Taterpress

Who doesn't like potato prints? Central Saint Martin's student Ed Cornish and friend did some print work with their hand-carved spud font. See more images of their process on Ed's Flickrstream.
:: Via the always interesting Printeresting! 

Architectural Wonders

Seeing the Modern Architecture 101 work above from the guys over at TheAllNighter the other day, reminded me of a font design based upon architectural icons created by my former student, Shinya Iwaki. I posted about it two years ago along with a crowd of other wonderful experimental fonts, all designed for my xType class, but this one really deserves far more attention. It is called Cityscape and it is populated by 26 architectural wonders. Students were each tasked with an assignment to design a font of their own choice of any media and Shin chose to design one based upon buildings. He spent many hours pouring through architecture books at the library and researching online for buildings that vaguely simulated each letter of the alphabet. He illustrated, (or hand-built) each building in the context of a letter it most closely resembled. Each letter consists of a real construction and he has included the name of the building, the city and the date each was completed. Shin's Cityscape was originally produced as a poster and much later as an impressive deck of 26 letterpressed cards in an edition of 100. He is now living in Brooklyn and I don't know if posters or the cards are for sale, but with enough encouragement, maybe we can persuade him to print a 2nd edition! 

If you haven't yet seen my student's work from the past two xType xHibits, I highly recommend it to you. View some from the 2009 class and 2010, and take time to watch the videos too, as they are each amazing. Oh, and one more unforgettable font here which you should not miss! I wish I had more of this kind of work to show you for 2011, but the xType class was cancelled this year }: - ( I may now have to take it on the road somewhere, some day. Hmm...xType hits the road. I like the sound of this!

Update: I received a note from Shin just 2 days after the earthquake in Japan. Shin tells me he has recently returned to live in Japan and he is okay. I hope he continues to do well as Japan recovers from this disaster. He is interested in selling some of his decks of the Cityscape alphabet, and if you are interested he can be contacted here.

Early Experimental Typography

Even monks like to play with type!
:: Via Abbsworth

A Fontcycle

An alphabet of bicycle parts by Houston designer Juan Larios. The concept for his Dirty Ride alphabet was based upon an assignment to design an alphabet of something he loved. 

:: Via his Coroflot page.

The Illustrated Alphabet of Birds

The ABC Birds tin got me thinking about bird alphabets so I did some poking around. At first glance I came upon this wonderful children's book, The Illustrated Alphabet of Birds, first published in 1851 by Wm. Crosby and H.P. Nichols. I love the title page typography. I also found a version where someone adapted the book and created a nice feather alphabet to accompany it. You can see a few samples above and check out the entire book here. If anyone knows who may have designed the feather letters, I would love to know. The Baldwin Library of Children's Literature in the Department of Special Collection at the University of Florida's Georgre A. Smather Libraries has a complete digital copy available of the original text for viewing here.

El Alfabeto

The alphabet as illustrated by 4th and 5th graders from Pittsfield Elementary School in Ann Arbor Michigan.

Bling-Bling

In his visual essay, Iced Up and Platinum Plus, graphic designer Ryan Molloy wittingly references traditional art nouveau and art deco ornamental forms and fuses them with bling-inspired designs of hubcaps, gold teeth and other diamond-encrusted accessories from hip-hop culture. Like a hip-hop DJ, I integrate these older forms with my newly designed bling-inspired ornaments he claims. To demonstrate this, Molloy deliberately borrows a page from traditional book design and creates beautiful decorative borders. I do wish Molloy would release his Bling-Bling font, so the rest of us could do some sampling too.

Honey, I've Shrunk The Declaration of Independence

Ken Perlin, Professor of Computer Science at NYU Media Research Lab, claims to have developed the smallest readable screen font, called Tiny, which is designed specifically for LCD screens. As an experiment, Perlin reduced our 500 word Declaration of Independence to fit a small 320 x 240 pixel QVGA display using his closely-leaded 2 pt. Tiny font with a justified setting. Surprisingly, it is still somewhat readable. The circular magnification inside Perlin's example below provides some hint of Tiny's resolution, however I would dare him to try and letterspace this text any tighter! At best, he would have to answer to the Type Police. And does he have any clue what the Tea Party crowd might do to him when they see how our Declaration of Independence is being further reduced? Just sayin'...














Via Makezine

xType xHibit Redux

The month of April marks the 2nd Annual Student xType Culture Show at the school's Hunter Art Gallery. This show features the work of 48 students and their experiments creating alphabets which are fantastical, found, illustrated, photographed, videoed, animated, 3D, baked, stamped, stenciled, sketched on pavement, burned in grass, and imagined. The rules of play were to construct an experimental display font of 26 letters out of any media (with the exception of flammable, toxic or xRated, but this edict was even ignored), and they were bound only by time, money, materials and their imagination. After enduring a previous quarter of intensive book design where micro-typography conventions were the order – this was a big paradigm shift. I confronted them with new objectives; be playful, be expressive and examine what it means to create a font without any fundamental notions of legibility, readability, function or aesthetics. By challenging them to avoid these traditional typographic principles – where the function of type and reading are impaired – it made for some very surprising and creative results. It allowed the students to view the alphabet (whether real or imagined) in an entirely new context and challenged some of their own preconceptions. They were compelled to often carefully examine each letterform and in some cases deconstruct them into vaguely pixelated shapes. These playful typographic experimentations take flight in all directions and their results continue to impress and amaze me. I am happy to provide a sneak preview of some of their alphabets here. The show opens on Thursday, April 8th at the Hunter Art Gallery in the school's atrium from 5 to 8pm. The gallery is open M-F, 9:30am–3:30pm and also T and W evenings from 5-7pm. 1701 Broadway on Capitol Hill in Seattle.

Sand Serif, the elaborate video above, created with sand on top of a light table in a darkened room, is the work of two multi-cultural and multi-talented students, Mykhaylo Sinenko, originally from the Ukraine and Priyanka Basu from India. It is beautifully choreographed, and with over 7 hours of video editing alone–is a marvel to watch.

The Leitura Paper Swashes film below, is a stunningly beautiful stop action video created by Chloe Scheffe. She brings Leitura Swashes to life with cut paper, fishing line and tape.


Leitura Paper Swashes from Chloe Scheffe on Vimeo.




Populations, above, by Erin Kendig is an interactive demographic of the population of 26 letters on page 167 of The Great Gatsby. Erin presumes that letters are a metaphor for humans as they have feet, legs, arms and she goes on to illustrate how they each populate the randomly chosen page 167. Give it a whirl here.

The following works are Fleuras, by Donna Belnavis, a font produced with forsythia flowering branches; Enlightened Letters, by Jee Lee, a paper engineered pop-up book structure electrically lit by an LED bulb. I hope to get a video of this book up here soon; GemType, by Wyatt Carroll, a font designed with amethyst crystals in Photoshop; Boundaries, by Ross Coyne, a tunnel book structure of a stencil-cut alphabet; and Egg Fancy, by Chieu Van, a font with each letter illustrated on an egg in the tradition of Ukrainian egg dyeing, using wax resist and colorful dyes.

Going Rogue

Going Rogue - An Experimental Typeface from Ryan Ogborn on Vimeo.

For someone who has serious contempt for firearms, I find it ironic that my last 3 posts all have a gun-related theme. This one comes from my student, Ryan Ogborn, who took to a shooting gallery to "design" his experimental font this quarter. He claims it is inspired by the font, Bernhardt Medium and Sarah Palin. I admit I was very reluctant to give him my blessing on this production, but I think it is quite mavericky–and in that case–experimental. I'm rather offended however when I see the bullet-riddled face of Bernhardt, (Cheney could have done better), but sometimes one has to take a hit for art's sake. Frankly, I think Ryan scored a big hit with his Palin-inspired tribute. However the winking emoticon on his poster (click to enlarge) got a big zero.

xType Culture Show

The rules of engagement for my experimental typography class were an "about face" from classwork of the previous quarter teaching the fine typography skills required of book design. Here are just a few of the 37 great examples currently on exhibit in our school's art gallery through end of April.

From the top: Emi Buckmaster: Ephemeral (Suminagashi) | Shinya Iwaki: Cityscape (Handmade letterforms of architecture) | Sean Fischer: Dance Team (video of dancing girls, a pirate and a cat) | Adam Curtis: InterAction (Flash animation and lots of coffee) | Atticus Waller: Dreamgasm (Handmade letterforms) | Reis O'Brien: Toypography (cheap plastic toys) | Jordan Dailey: Micron Font (100s of Micron pens) | Mike Holm: ABC Gum (26 pieces of gum) | Anna Goldstein: Typuccino (26 lattes) | Jen Pearce: Rind (Oranges).