Ransom Notes

Ransom Notes is a weird concept that a lot of people have dabbled in. It is essentially taking a bunch of letters from a magazine, newspaper, comic book, or anything that has large letters on it and put them all together on a sheet of paper in a way that makes them spell out a message. It can be any message that a person desires to put up, but most ransom notes end up spelling out demanding messages. Some examples include “Leave a bag of Fritos at the door at 8:30. P.S. Bring dip”, “Give us the stamps and nobody gets hurt”, or my own ransom notes that spell out “Bring your brain cells, they are necessary.”

What ransom notes have that differ from regular typography are the different fonts and typefaces that are juxtaposed together in a number of ways. In regular typography, the typefaces are usually the same depending on whether you’re writing or typing a sentence, although it usually amounts to the same thing throughout. When doing a ransom note, however, the typefaces are all random and usually has only two or three letters that are relatively the same, leaving you with a lot of room for interpretation than usual as to how to convey your message.

That is exactly what I had to do for my final project, as I had to come up with something clever, funny, and demanding to be a ransom note. I came up with a couple of ideas but I ended up with what I noted before as “Bring your brain cells, they are necessary.” I chose that because it can come off as a demand/threat to the majority of people who do a lot of nonsense in this world just for attention. To them, it comes off as “Hey, use your brain and don’t do anything stupid that’ll get you in trouble.” Though the number of people I said the quote to in my class, they thought it was a bit funny, which is also the point of the note, to be funny and demanding at the same time.