Bonus*
Everyone loves a bonus. Here are some extra projects—experiments and research that are self directed. Often inspired by a client project or a visual that never made it to the finish line, some of these have taken on a life of their own.
This first example is a speculative project that came out of an identity job for the Women’s Building. As a studio, we asked ourselves how type and gender might relate. I wondered what if by harnessing the power of social media and autocorrect, we were able to introduce a new gender neutral pronoun glyph into the language? If every time you typed ‘he’ or ‘she’ your device replaced those words with a new symbol. Perhaps if this happened to everyone at the same time, our language could shift.
This idea was presented in a talk at Typographics. I later picked the project back up and using Source Sans as a base, I programmed a font that used the ligature function to auto correct to the symbol. In talking with the Source Sans type designer, he eventually added it to the font. If you look for it you can find it. You can also read about the project on the AIGA design blog.
For another project, I gave myself the license to make painted copies of design—some of my favorites from the cannon as well as things found on-line—all the while thinking and writing about the role copying has in design. As designers we utilize common visual languages to communicate, but we also need to try to push expectations and not fall into lazy repetition. I was in Italy at the time of the project, so I also had fun copying the vernacular typographic landscape. The issue of copying is especially pertinent in light of AI and assisted design programs that provide handy ready-to-use templates. More examples and some meandering writings can be found here.
Other recent projects address language in different ways. Inspired by the malleability of our alphabet and through listening to a podcast on the history of english, I’ve been painting letters, words, and even just sounds. For instance ah, aw, oh—notice how as you say the words, the sounds move up through your mouth. Or ah, and ha, how your mouth barely changes—H is more like breath than a consonant. Of course, these words are also painted thinking about how much you can push the form while maintaining legibility. With homographs the spelling of words is the same while the pronunciation changes depending on meaning. If it takes you a minute to puzzle out the word, are you more committed to one word or another? well, it’s still in progress here, sometimes it’s more fun when you don’t know where you’re going.
