Holmberg Tom
15.02.07
My font put to the related context. Never mind the kerning and other typographical finesse. I had no time to finalise the forms, shapes and proportions of the basic font, ‘cos the melted letters took all my time. There is really a lot of work to be done with the type, but I don’t think perfection was the aim of the workshop anyway. The roughness is the design is pretty much the art rock factor that Lucas implied at in the intro. One of the things that bugs me is that i started designing on a whim, and did severeal characters before i defined the x height. In fact the gemena x is the last character i designed. The initial type came together so quickly that the design was mastering me, rather than me mastering the design. Ah, fuck it. My type rocks!
Done! In the nodebox animation the weeds move. The fun thing is that when the melted spillings at the bottom intertwine, they for totally new forms.
Pärre/Oskar: Wow. This is awesome work. The idea has evolved to a really strong one and the final thing is aestethically pleasing. It was great to see this type animated on the NodeBox screen. The motion is almost hypnotic, and it works!
14.02.07
The melting typeface is coming together. I like the fact that when it’s black, it looks sticky and like oil (=evil). When you make the text blue and play with opacities, it looks like water. On the other hand this is so much work it’s hard to maintain the quality I want.
Today the evening news on TV said that the rise of the sea level caused by global warming (MELTING the glaciers) will make refugees of 65 million people in the future. I wish I had numbers in my melting font so I could make grim statistics. There are feally plentiful amounts of calculations done by scientists regarding the subject. Some of the extreme models to scan the future predict, that a couple hundred years from now, the planent can sustain only a couple million people. The radical finnish deep ecologist, Pentti Linkola, will laugh in his grave.
09.02.07
Global warming, in a way, is the ultimate meme. It’s the melting point of cultural and biological evolution. It is caused by the actions of humans as a result of cultural evolution, but will affect all biological evolution.
In addition, the term itself is a man-made meme.
12.02.07
Okay, my current status is that during the weekend I tried to make an experimental typeface that reflects my meme. First I did some letters with floral patterns, that related to a second phase of my meme. First comes global warming, a natural phenomenon that’s creation is artificial. It is build on a strong desire in mankind to make and spread cultural contents and infrastructures, memes. Global warming leads to a large scale extinction on global scale. In my concept after that decline a Gaia meme kicks in ( Gaia is manmade concept about the planet as a living entity with revenge in it’s sleeve). I thought of a typeface composed of organic growing matter. So first I tried out some gaia letters.
After trying this I started drawing letters that cascade towards the ground, signifying melting, relating to my main topic, global warming. Then the cascading form started resembling a serif of a typeface. I made the letter into a more formal shape and discovered what I really had was the versal A letter of an antiqua font. Somehow I got totally carried away with this notion, since I have only done sans serif typefaces before. I had thought that making a serif font would be next to impossible in difficulty. So I wanted to find out if I was able to design a serif typeface. Apparently I was. In two days I made all the gemena letters of my antiqua type and some versals, and the font works with ligatures and everything. The spacing and kerning is still unfinished. The working title of the font is AnnoDomini. I’m not exactly on the map about how my antiqua font relates to this project about experimental type and multimedia, but I hope I can find some use for it in this context.
Nice work! Some of the letters might look a different typeface, but anyways its good. And done in 2 days makes it even better. Keep up the good work.
- Markus
13.02.07
Now that I’ve got my typeface, it’s time to destroy it. The civilized mankind is heating up the athmosphere and melting down my type. People of the world, spice up your life! Every boy every girl, fuck up your type!
After it has taken the heat and melted down it’s ready for nature’s vengeance. It will start to push some daisies.
nodeboxed
As a designer I’m anal about form and shape, so I returned to the analog method. I’m drawing melted letters to my type. Thanks to the other Tom and Fred for the laborous efforts in creating melting codes. I will get back to them later. The melted letters are going to be in the place of versal letters, as the clean characters are gemena. This melting and screwing up the type seems to take even more time than designing the clean characters did. Sometimes spending hours on basically meaningless stuff like this makes me think if I should be doing something something with a relation to the real world, like showeling the snow or helping the aged to cross the street or something. But I’m not sure if I like the elderly. And because the hours go so fast and effortlessly I know I’m actually doing what the world intended for me.
This is a idea scketch of a parallel interpretation of the meme.
At first I had lots of different ideas, then making the serif font led me astray. Today as we talked about oil in the nodebox, one of my first ideas started to haunt me again. Oil is the fuel of everything, specially it is the fuel of global warming. I have had an idea about intertwining typeface that is a gas hose. When you start a sentence, the versal letter is the dispenser handle, then you type your sentence (with the hose). When you end the sentence you press period, which is the gas tank. So your sentence starts with the handle and ends in the tank. I’m seriously considering in trying to get this font also quickly done, as well as the melted capitals of the other font. Now I just have to catch up with some sleep. I might have come to school a little later I just have to sleep a little.