With the assignment requirement being cut from 6 to 4 pieces, I guess I can breathe a tiny sigh of relief.

I have chosen Introvert, Gamer, World-Building, and Rational as my final 4 ideas.

Introvert

Going on my initial idea of using wrought iron fences as a physical embodiment of my desire to keep people/crowds out, I went to google some common designs for these fences.

It seems that the most common type of iron fencing are actually very simple, which I suppose is preferable, as it is meant to serve the functional purpose to warding rather than the social purpose of being aesthetically impressive. Taking on the idea of name seals/stamps, I can incorporate the insular script lettering into the common circle/ring patterns many of these fences seem to employ.

As can be seen, insular script already has a very circular, self-contained look about it, and should mesh quite well within the rings of the fence.

Gamer

With Chinese New Year, I have acquired materials! 

Behold! Ponkan box.

The cardboard is smooth and the box is huge, so I should have plenty of material to work comfortably with.

Given my limited ability to craft a functional interactive object however, I have chosen a simpler design. Rather than a Gameboy Color, I will make it resemble a Playstation Portable.vs

Like so:

Now that the buttons are clearly on either side of the screen, the left-to-right sliding mechanism to change the letter on the screen should be easier to make than the up-to-left-to-right-to-down mechanism if the buttons had been at the bottom of the screen like in the Gameboy.

Rational

I decided to go with flooding the screen with names in different fonts and colours.

It’s mostly done; still looks a little plain though. I’ll fiddle around a little more to see what I can do with the layers.

World-Building

I haven’t actually physically progressed on this one. The blueprint idea shared in the group consult by Andrew seemed interesting, but there’s a lot more to world-building than the progression of a single building/item/aspect. Perhaps I can expand on that by using pieces of tracing paper, and drawing/writing various ideas and concepts down in scraps. The scraps can gradually amalgamate over the course of letters and finally come together in the form of a sphere/globe at the end of my name (the roundness of ‘e’ lending itself well to this idea as well).

I have identified the six attributes of myself that I want to explore for this first project: my introversion, rationality, and my love for science, world-building, games, and my indulgence in escapism.

• Introvert

As in introvert, I place a strong emphasis on personal boundaries.  I am also not very social, and will almost never take the first step in a new friendship by initiating conversation. In large social gatherings and situations, I withdraw into myself even more, becoming tired, irritable, and even a little hostile. As such, I wanted to use a font that depicts this self-contained nature of the introvert, a font that obtains its form by going inwards, rather than outwards. I rejected the first two subtractive fonts I tried, as the circular one looked too cute and bubbly whereas the square one looked too bold. I then considered other normal fonts that looked subtractive, and settled on insular script. Insular script also has additional pun points because insular->insulate implies my desire to hide away and insulate myself from social situations. I also considered using the representation of a fence as a symbol of a literal barrier between myself and others. I rejected the initial idea of a picket fence because it brings to mind an American suburban neighbourhood which felt too homely and normal and neighbourly for my purposes. When I thought about barriers and impenetrable places, I thought of looming stone walls and ornate wrought iron fences. I hence chose the wrought iron fence design as it’s usually topped by what looks like sharp spear-tips, and the swirling repeating designs easily incorporated the roundness of insular script letters.

• Rational

I value rational thought, by which I mean I don’t enjoy nor empathise with people who enjoy acting on impulse or emotion. I also hate it when people attempt to justify their actions by saying things like “because it’s the law”, “because I’m your authority and I say so”, “because God said so”, “because magic”, “because it’s the done thing”, “because rules are meant to be broken”, “because everyone else is doing it”. Considering the sheer number of people who think that way, I feel like I’m constantly surrounded by weirdness, stupidity and/or borderline insanity (although I do recognise that I’ve fallen into such traps myself). I wanted to represent this by showing a ludicrous mess of unnecessarily decorative fonts in the background while my name is written simply and cleanly in black.

• Science

I enjoy learning science, especially the moment where things finally begin to come into focus and make sense. The joy of deriving meaning or connection between seemingly disparate elements, of discovery and learning, is what I wanted to convey. I made it look like a page of a field journal of a biologist, as biology is my favourite science, to bring across the moment where the scientist first sees something new out in the field and spontaneously records their excitement and observations. In the text and illustration, I plan to subtly incorporate the shapes of my initials ‘M’ and ‘T’, so that the viewer too can have a moment of revelation and discovery when they do manage to find the letters and understand. I will also use a script font as old field journals typically were written in the common cursive handwriting of the time.

• World-Building

One of my hobbies is creating imaginary worlds (as evident by the bio section of my OSS profile). More than directly telling the story set in it, I enjoy creating the setting, about figuring out what languages exist, what dialects there are, about trade and currency, about social and economic strata, about flora and fauna and the ecosystem, etcetera. Thus I tried to show this by having a progression from 2D to 3D, to bring across the idea of bringing a world to life. The initial half of the 2D card is mostly clean, and has colour. Any images added there are complete and whole. The letters have depth to them by adding jumping clay (an air-drying clay), which can be painted to look like mountains or buildings or trees or large animals. The latter half of the 2D card becomes increasingly more sketchy, with erasures and half-formed animals and random notes as that world-creator (me) continues to puzzle out how the rest of the world should function.

• Gamer

My other hobby is playing video games. While I play a wide variety of video games, my favourite are role-playing games (RPGs), likely because it ties in to my above appreciation of world-building. In an RPG, your character interacts with the world the game designer has created, thereby impacting the world and progressing the story. Some of my favourite RPGs are Dragon Age and Undertale, where players are given many choices and scenarios with the non-player characters (NPCs) and environments reacting differently to you depending on what you did. I wanted to convey that idea of agency and interactivity, hence I chose to design a game interface, specifically the character-naming screen, as this is the screen that usually marks the end of character creation and the start of player influence on the game world. Many players also spend ages on this screen thinking of a name for their in-game avatar, while others choose to name the character after themselves to play the game as a literal self-insertion. The font itself can be something pixel-y such as 8bitoperator to complement the old Gameboy design. By building it out of cardboard, I can include a real interactive element where pressing the A-button causes the ‘e’ to slide into place, completing the name ‘Madeline’. Pressing the B-button will slide the ‘e’ out and replace it with a blank, giving the appearance of backspacing (on a Gameboy, A is the button to press to insert or accept an option while B is to reject or remove an option). The challenge is in getting the measurements correct so that the interactive mechanism can function smoothly.

• Escapism

Escapism refers to the tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy. Although I typically scorn those who wilfully believe in fantasies, especially about themselves and the role they play in society, I also enjoy indulging in fantasy from time to time. More often than not, they are not fantasies that involve myself, but rather my favourite characters. I spend a lot of time viewing and creating fanworks (art, stories, games, videos, etc) about these characters in increasingly bizarre and fantastical situations, about utopias and dystopias and magic and dragons and court politics and so on. Rarely do my imaginings involve regular real-world scenarios or day-to-day drama. So it seems like I indulge in power fantasies and reject the capabilities of normal people, including myself. I tried to depict this in a number of ways, most involve trying to break, or escape, from the framing device (such as the box, or the shape of the letters). The parts that break out include words like “strong, smart, cunning, power” and so on, as I am fully aware that I am not really any of those things in any significant way, hence they are clearly fantasies I escape to. Also, my is MADeline and many people have called my by the short form MADdy or even just MAD, so I tried to do something with the first three letters of my name, including the quote by the cheshire cat “we’re all MAD here”. I am still uncertain about what to do for this attribute.

I have ever only been marginally interested in the art of typography, and so when tasked to research ways of using type to represent myself, I found myself coming up at a loss. A quick google search and Pinterest trawl later however, and I have found certain types of type (pun unintentional) I am partial to, and some that I’m… not so partial to.

Decorative text that interacts with a larger body of main, subject text:

The decorative text in both the above examples have been enlarged and warped so thoroughly that they are practically illegible, yet both maintain enough form/context to imply their meaning. The decoration then goes on to interact with a larger body of smaller, presumably content, text. In the above example, the decoration is used as a unique framing device, and the bottom example has the decoration crashing into the body of text. The implied nature of the header text is pleasing to me as it engages the viewer in a more active manner than blatant presentation, while the interactivity and framing shown above presents text as a dynamic work of visual art rather than simply words on a page.

Beautiful and interesting fonts:

The bottom two examples engage in the use of positive and negative space, in the ‘W’ to imply the boundaries of the letter, and in the ’49’ to mimic a flat-brush’s strokes. The ‘W’ type also gives a slight illusion of depth and texture. The brush-stroke type features jittering and blots, errors arising from human uncertainty and/or lack of practice, and largely absent from the standardised perfect calligraphy world of font, so it’s an interesting and refreshing change to see such ‘errors’ deliberately made or left in the final work. The topmost picture features the spines of a few hardcover books, most actually bear unremarkable standard serif or sans serif fonts. However, they have been harmoniously woven into a lattice of decorative motifs and together produce a sophisticated and interesting design.

Shape fonts:

I call these fonts ‘shape fonts’ because they deliberately imitate a certain image or shape. In the above, the font invokes the blue and splatter of water, the shape of the ‘A’ itself largely unimpacted or otherwise altered. Likewise for the Snow White ‘S’. It looks mostly as thought they had a regular ‘S’ printed and taped on a few extra white and red parts. I do like these two, because despite being unsubtle, they have been executed fairly tastefully and are not garish or over-the-top. String several of these together however, like in a word or phrase, and it would look disgustingly overdone.

Functional 3D fonts: 

I call the above 6 examples ‘functional’ 3D because they make use of their 3D medium. Some fonts I found in my search for 3D typography  (such as the last one, I’ll get to that in a bit) appeared to merely pay lip service to the word ‘3D’, and was nothing more than a regular 2D font stretched on one end (height). In these examples, the different ways the 3D medium is employed are, in order: a topological relief reminiscent of the earth’s surface, the drop shadow of the railing is what makes the text readable rather than the railing itself, a multiple layered piece employing lights and frames, and interactive moving parts built into the font. The sixth piece, though not employing the 3D nature quite as interestingly, is not dull for me as the negative spaces (the boards the lights sit on) are also given detail and attention. The height of the font is also not artificially raised, stretched, and elongated meaninglessly for the mere sake of it, but rather is shown as a coincidental side effect of the way the light tubes work.  Contrast that to the seventh and last piece, which I do not like at all, with its meaningless and gratuitous extension of the height dimension of what is basically an ordinary sans serif font without any further addition of function or detail.

Decorative 3D fonts: 

Not quite ‘functional’, but definitely not gratuitous either. These fonts are 3D simply because the medium they are made with happen to be 3D. It’s entirely possible that the fonts can be simplified and vectorised as a 2D computer-input font without too much of a loss in a viewer’s ability to appreciate them. The 3D presentation is therefore kind of extraneous, but the employment of the medium for the creation of text in the first place is rather unique and interesting.

Obscured or abstract type:

The arrangement and presentation of the letters in combination with the typeface they are in makes it impossible to see a word before seeing the image. In the case of the bottom example, it is even likely that there is simply no text to be read, and the letters are really only there to create visual mass. In the above example, which I personally really enjoy, viewers will initially be deceived into thinking that it’s a simple depiction of two side-glancing eyes. What it actually is is the number 1984 written sideways, with the 9 repeated to look like eyes. Itself a very cute, interesting, yet minimalist design, it gains another level of significance as a visual pun when one is aware of what the book is actually about (a ‘big brother state’ that watches the lives of all its citizens).

Stuff I really don’t like: quotes rewritten in hodgepodge fonts.

Too many arbitrarily employed fonts and effects that have little to no significance and contribute nothing other than a vaguely off-mood illustration for the more obvious and literal parts of the quote. Poor sizing choice also means that the punchline of ‘just kidding’ is almost entirely ignored. Poor mood perception means the contrast between the idealistic first half with the harsh second half is not felt at all. Too me, it feels like the person just grabbed a random quote off the internet, understood individual words and made arbitrary and needless illustrations for some, plunked the rest of the words in a filter-generator, then gathered all these bits and pieces and lumped them together and called it a day. Just. No. This one isn’t actually quite so bad; at least it limits itself to 2/3 cursive and sans serif fonts.

If you like it, good for you. None for me, thanks.

Stuff I do rather like that looks a bit like the stuff that I don’t like:

This ‘poster’ seems to contain unnecessarily fancy calligraphy, with lots and lots of flourishes, as well as bouncing up and down and around for no real reason other than just because, has obvious ‘illustrations’, and is likewise presented in that vague arch shape that the previous thing (and its ilk) was. So why do I like it? First: the calligraphy is fancy, but at least it limits itself to a single font. Second: there are calligraphic letter flourishes, but at least there are to no banners, random lines, or awkwardly orphaned single words (the most common victims being connectors and prepositions such as ‘if’ and ‘on to’ etc). Third: the bouncing around I believe is due in part to the flourishes, they take up space and warp the rest of the text. Fourth and fifth: This is an advertisement, they’re squeezing as much information as possible in the standard poster size, the seeds on the display are advertising the seed sale. So the medium and the execution may be somewhat similar to the quote rewrites, but considering the context and content the former two are more than excusable.