week 20-27 October
From the Bingo, I was assigned to create a font or type family that represents non-verbal communication through conversation or interaction with other people.
Non-verbal communication: the language that cannot be written or verbally expressed such as body language, intentions or attitudes.
This Friday we had a workshop with Joanna Przedlacka on speech and I became particularly intrigued with how intonation can affect the meaning of a phrase. This phenomenon was especially proved with software that visualised speech signals as a coloured display, the Faroson. This tool assigns colours to the speech sounds in order to visually represent the particular nuances of each people’s words. Joanna also kept reminding us that writing is not an accurate way of representing speech since we do not speak how we write the majority of the time.
She gave this example. The way we place the melody on this sentense can completely change its meaning.
2. if we make it interesting, people will come.
3 if we make it, interesting people will come.
On that day, I went home wondering if a typeface could not only transcribe the words a person says but be a tool to represent people’s intonation. So, ultimately, the written would become more similar to the spoken language.
From here, I started playing with Audition, an editor tool that also serves as a sound visualizer. I recorded myself saying the above sentence in the 3 possible intonations.
Based on the soundwave, I want to create a variable font in which the x hight dictates the intonation the sound is intended to produce.
As for the shape of the font, I thought there could be a distinction between the positivity or negativity of the intentions/emotions a sentence or a word is portraying, for example:
My idea is to base the shape on geometric forms that could represent positivity/negativity. So I made an Instagram Poll to get a general understand of what shapes people considered to be more welcoming and warm or, on the contrary, cold and less inviting.
Following this poll, l want to create a variable font that varies in height and has two shape sets. One set will be curvy and round-based, for positive emotions, and the second will be pointy and stark for the negative intentions (could be a good add-on to do a neutral version based on a square but I am not sure I’ll have the time to accomplish).