Typographic Art Experiments
Over the past week, I’ve been working on some very detailed typographical standards for a work project. The work involves special attention to details such as font size, proportion, line-height, typeface selections, drop-cap, vs initial cap, and all other sorts of typographical minutia. On the other hand, I’ve been experimenting with using type to create visual imagery in a partially controlled, random sort of way.
Using Flash, I’ve created some fairly simple scripts that output characters onto the canvas in a random way. Scale, rotation & opacity and generated randomly. The position on the canvas is also random, but constrained loosely to a logarithmic spiral, or specific portions of the canvas. Some parameters are tied to others to help influence the end result.
Here are some of the resulting images:
The flash file is a bit processor intensive (It takes some time to generate the blurs), but overall it works pretty good for creating this type of random imagery. View unique images generated directly from the flash file here and here.
Very interesting. I have been thinking a lot about type lately. In fact, just the other nigh I was laying in bed not able to sleep because I was thinking about designing my own typeface. Just imagining how I would set up the initial structure… what would it look like? how would it be unique? etc.. Even if I never actually publish it, I’m going to begin my project very soon. Mostly for my own educational value.
Very cool. I’ve had the same thoughts lately. About a year ago I bought some software from FontLab (TypeTool 2) which lets you build your own fonts. It comes in very handy for manipulating existing fonts, but it also has the basic set that you need to create a font from scratch. I purchased the educational version, which was only $50.
I’ve been working on converting my knotted inital caps into a working font also…
I’ll be interested to hear how you go about it. I could definitely use some knowledge share when I start to cross that bridge.