Dennis Kestelle dennis.kestelle@telenet.be

Monday 24 January

Idea one

Interact with the typeface but not human-computer, but computer-computer, talking to eachother in text balloon. When one says something, the other reacts, louder and angrier, and they start talking to eachother, until they settle down. It can be set between 2 or more computers. Input is from the other computer(s), output is input for others...

Discussion, throw facts at eachother, to over-reason eachother. The typeface could react on how angry they are, or if they're settled. Almost the same as Frank, but it speaks with another Frank. The balloons could also react on the text (form, size,...)

Idea two

Weather channel font. Font that expresses the weather conditions. Input is the weather, and it visually reacts. Color/animation/size. You can use it online, on the website, or on display. Playground.

REACTIONS Frederik: Weather font has already been done by Letterror for Twin Cities. Tom: Game theory. Set of rules (mathematical/philosophical) that say how games work. You can team up or work together or be enemies to eachother. Two types of dialogue is a typical game/theory. Concept of two things fighting untill they can live together. Lucas: Anti-intelligence. Could be very fun to show dumbness.

Tuesday 25 January

I am working on a totally new concept: a "dumb" font, without intelligence. Intelligence is being able to read, make abstractions, ... All those ideas are now reversed. In my idea, dumb means "not intelligent" - the lowest form of intelligence. It will have to be intelligently made to look as stupid as possible... how far can I go?

Interaction between the user and the font has to be very bad. Also, it will look as bad as possible.

REACTIONS: * Maikki: Will it look be bad or be bad? Does it have any potential? * Lucas: A dumb font is just following all the rules it can get. However, letters only work when they form words. Letters don't mean anything, it's the relationship between them.

Wednesday 26 January

Today I continued my studies on intelligence and what intelligence has to do with typefaces.

Fonts have a history of evolving to what they are now. It aren't things you find in nature and recognise as a font. It is 'invented' entirely by man, as a tool/system to write down words. Words wich are names we give to things: giving names to things is the base of human intelligence. The characterdesigns or fonts are just conventions we make. So defining how a sound or character (or eventually word or meaning) should look like is the same as name-giving.We don't have to construct a font (or alphabet) everytime we want to communicate. We just use the one that is common for our language. We just have to learn it and use it with people who've also learned the same. In that case we can use the font (or alphabet) to make words with meaning, that need even more intelligence: to understand the meaning of words the characters construct. So on this level it is possible to communicate the words without their meaning: the other person would just know how to pronounce it, and that's it.

But I have to concentrate on the font. It holds information by its form: each character is enough diffirent from another, so we can recognise it as unique. If every character looks the same: it would be unintelligently constructed or a dumb font, but that doesn't make us unintelligent. If the forms are diffirent but unpredictable: it would also be dumb. Because one character wouldn have an infinate number of forms and wouldnt hold any clear information. It wouldnt be learnable.

Typography or the rules of typography are also important for us to understand the text we read. The way characters follow eachother, are placed in a way they form groups of words and groups of sentences. The way we distinguish important text from less important (by weight or size or position) is a great part of the information, on top of the word information. So if the font would appear randomly in those ways: it would be dumb. Bold, italic,size... The font would be unintelligent if it takes us too long to understand it or maybe don't understand it at all. We understand it because we instantly recognise it. That process is instant, and that's why it is a good system. If it would take us too long to understand every letter individualy and then the word... it would be dumb. So a font may not be too difficult, undone from unnessecary details (if the details have their own meaning, because otherwise it would just be ornaments)

So by creating the multiplicty again. Taking out the differentiation. A font becomes part of 'nature' again, of unpredictableness. And we would just have to accept it as it is without understanding. A font, with characters, acts like a "mass". The characters are part of a whole we should take for granted.

Practically: All characters have to be somewhat alike, cary elements of eachother in eachother so you can't realy know which is which + it has to be random (unpredictable).

You couldn't use your intelligence to understand or use it. Better: the font must obstruct any kind of use of intelligence to do something with the font.

REACTIONS: Lucas: Don't look too far, there are other views on how to make a dumb font. Mostly it's the smallest thing that makes the diffirence... Tom: You could take elements of all of your possibilities and try to connect them in the context. Doing that could make the font look even more stupid. Try not finding the ultimate solution in 1 thing, but in more things that connect.

Thursday 27 January

Started in Fontlab. Ligatures, ligatures, ligatures...

Friday 28 January

Same concept, but a little less radical.

Tried to take out all the inteligence, not complete chaos.

Letters are still letters. Every character has a basic idea of how it would be.

Most work next week. Appear randomly. Different leters have different appearances.

Ligatures in Opentype, replaced by special characters.

Whenever I type "the" it becomes "duh".

It's very easy to build some "intelligence".

None of the letters have a relationship with the rest of the family, so that they do form a bond.

From each letter I took away a specific character.

The typeface is ready and baptised as: Defontisation.

Monday 31 January

I will publish my thoughts and research on intelligent typography in a book. Looking at the content I already have, it will have about 200 pages and will be printed in my own Defontisation font.

The basic idea is to make a book with random text from Kant Generator. I also like to make the current characters more random. Each character can have 4 versions appearing in different sizes or weights or place, so that when you type a letter 'a' multiple times, it will appear as four different a's.

Some of the variations are not content-related; like blanks.