week 27 Oct – 2 Nov

1º (triangle emoji)

Following last week’s tutorial, I aimed to understand how the shape of a typeface can be a visual aid at understanding someone’s speech. However, this week, I used the context of subtitling as the output of my iterations. 

Starting with Amélie, a movie directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet in 2001, I created a typeface for two of the characters. The goal was to understand at what extent typography could visually represent a character and how the visual interaction of different typography shapes would make the plot clearer, especially for the hearing impaired. Both the typefaces created are inspired on the sketches developed last week following in Instagram Poll on what shapes people consider to be warm/friend or cold/austere.

The first typeface, Amelie Regular, represented the main character. Amélie is a shy but bubbly person and, although she doesn’t like to socialise, all she wants is to make the lives of people around her a little better. Consequently, Amelie Regular is a quirky monospaced typeface based on round shapes. It explores odd shapes and each character has it’s distinct characteristic.

The second represents Amélie’s father, a retired army soldier that never had a childhood (people assumed he was always a fully grown grumpy man). And since his wife died, he became even more cold and distant. For him, I created the Amelie’s Father Regular, a monospaced typeface that is based on the shape of triangles. Every character tries to look exactly like the previous one, so it doesn’t deviate from the rules.

From there, I applied them in the context of the subtitles. These are stills from a scene between Amélie and her father.

This iteration explores the advantages of having a visual distinction between the character’s lines since it allows the viewer to clearly know who is speaking without the audio context. However, it also raises the question of how legible and acceptable is to have such stand out typefaces on screen. This following iteration helps to better understand how these would be applied on Film. (password: 123)

I also further developed last week’s idea of representing intonation through typography by applying these character’s discussion.

2º (triangle emoji)

In the meantime, I got in contact with Karina Johansson who has been working with closed captioning in Sweden since the late 80’s. She explained that, nowadays, closed captions are aimed at the hard of hearing since there has been a huge demand coming from streaming platforms and social media. She also sent me a couple of research papers on how people interact with CC and style guides that I would like to further explore.

Therefore, for the second triangulation, I want to explore how the shape of a typeface could better adapt to the changing circumstances in which closed captions are used. One of those times is during commutes so I was thinking of how typography could keep up with the bumpy travel on a tube.