Designblog

Words are magnets. Put two random words together, and they will enter in an (unintended) relationship. Of course in some cases it works better than others, in one case the result will be poetic, in the other criticism or humor will enter the stage.

As I was experimenting with this, using the tag words from DesignBlog, I noticed something. While combining the random words, they also started connecting to my surroundings, which were in that situation: the objects in my room.

Can random words and images enter in a “poetic threesome”?
I decided to do an experiment.

First I thought that maybe I should combine imagery from Google Image with the words, to make everything as random as possible. I tried this, but it didn’t really bring me any further. Of course some nice things happened, but it felt too general to me.

I liked the personal, intimate side of my first observation.
I made up two guidelines for myself:

1. use 26 tagwords from designblog starting with an “a”

2. use personal objects from your direct environment

I wanted to know what would happen, combining the random with the personal. The personal intertwined twice in the process: combining the random words.
I think I unconsciously made choices according to my own taste. Even though I tried hard to combine the words randomly, I couldn’t help seeing the connections that might happen. In the end, I’m a person, not an algorithm, and I decided to embrace this.

Also, the objects are personal. I chose objects that were personal because I got them from someone important to me, because they were mine for a long time, or because I use them daily.

I made may own small home-studio and started making the words and the objects literally interact.

Some interesting things happened:

– The impersonal words became more personal, and more meaningful, simply because they were combined with my own belongings

– The objects, that I’d always looked at in one way, became something else, the words created gateways to other meanings

 I think also the white background allowed the object to break with their original context and start forming new connections.

I found myself looking at my plant in a different way this morning.
Normally I barely notice it.

Am I living an automatic life? Or is the plant living an automatic life?

I wonder if there’s a third personal side to this: the connections we make when we see the random combinations. I make specific connections, someone else as well. We all have different imagery in our minds and different associations to the words used.

What will the objects think of all this?
I don’t think people would like to be put in a random context. I wouldn’t like to be called Amusement or About Absence.

Maybe someone will invent a way to give objects a platform for their opinion. Objects have rights too.
Until that moment, humans will have to give the objects meaning. And I think sometimes it’s good to re-evaluate this meaning.

Why should a fish be food and not amusement?

Can’t avocado’s also be animals?

Why should pepper never be afraid?

And why is Anita no hero when she’s standing in the kitchen all day?

I conducted research on the work of design duo Just Van Rossum (1966) and Erik van Blokland (1967) of the FF Beowolf team. In particular, I looked at their 1990 creation of Random Fonts- the first typeface with a mind of its own.

_Click on this image_

I initially got interested in researching FF beowolf font because I wanted to know how they could have made it in a way that the letters never are duplicated. So I made this visual motivation GIF. Drawing pieces can be letters and letters can be drawing images.

For example..(Click on the image)

Typeface software had already been produced by numerous programmers and had already been commercialized.

However, FF Beowolf made some adjustments.  What else could have been done in the world of digital typefaces? I could at least imagine that they had experienced the universal problems of digitized fonts and all concerns, as well as new potential discoveries in their works. Designers need to invest huge amounts of time to adapt something, and there has been much development in computer technology since the 1980s. What you can do with software is quite random, but what you do with ideas is of course never-ending. I think such an idea seems to be a promising field. In essence, digital fonts are programs of data and code, and the designer duo made an effort to show us the potentials of this.

 The idea of a changeable font is very interesting indeed. Letters did, however, also change already in the pre-digital era, only not on purpose. When letters were printed on paper the analogue way, the unstable printing technique caused unintentional differences in their shape. These differences were not desired by the creators. With Beowolf these changes of the letter’s shape were now made intentionally.  Randomization is also an important aspect of the font. Beowolf is a digital font that changes shape inside the printer. The font features a code that causes the letters to change its shape every time it gets printed. That means that no letter will exist in the same form twice and that you have no control over the outcome. This is, according to Van Blokland, the reason why it got so much attention. Because Beowolf is doing something it’s not supposed to do, namely randomly changing the shape of letters, which normally you won’t touch upon; you’re not suppose to break the letters, Van Rossum adds. In type design, there are an array of ways to work. Beowolf chose the method to show as input of code. In other words, they demonstrated that digital fonts are data and code: instructions that can modify themselves. (i.e.)

I realized that these methods differ from postscript language. You have an idea and you have to shape it, and that idea develops, but the designing can of course be done in many different ways.  You can produce a little drawing, you can use a design application or you can code something yourself. It makes it very easy to research complexity or to get a certain grip on complexity on a scale that you can’t do by hand. In his opinion, people can use the original PostScript fonts to generate 10 alternative shapes for each glyph in the font, but it might be impossible for approximately 100,000. But if you write a certain code (or script), it may only takes 2 minutes to find out how it will look. And then you can still decide whether it’s something good or not or you can delete it. 

_Click on this font_

Later, Jürg Lehni invented more dramatic drawing methods through scriptographer, as well as the software to interface with many devices.  Scriptographer’s strength lies in the encouragement of a symbiotic relationship between an existing tool for computer assisted manual creation and the benefits of formulating be spoke processes in code. Using Scriptographer, the user is no longer limited to the same standardized tools provided by closed software.  The scripting environment allows the creation of mouse-controlled drawing tools, effects that modify existing graphics, as well as scripts that create new ones.

_Click on this image_

Today, digital fonts are legally defined as software, once again as the digital counterpart of a tool. It is true that data, font, and graphic works can be possible for printing in diverse ways thanks to the development of postscript.

So I could see it being applied to unlimited shapes, saleable fonts or even drawings (never boring). It is intriguing that applying certain data allows randomized or unlimited outcomes.  Even though it requires mathematical methods at the beginning, it can lead to something random behind it.