New: Experimental Typographic Forms of the Past, Present and Potential Future

Category: Type Design, Publication, Machine Learning
Format: 72 pp publication
Printed: Whiteslaw Bindery
Bound: Ort Bindery
Year: 2021

Pronounced as “new” explores the blending of past, present and potential future through the typographical form. Combining Anglo-Saxon runes “Futhorc”, Helvetica and a series of randomly generated shapes through developed javascript code. Each rendition of the code offers an entirely new random layout of circles and squares in either negative or positive space which dictated before generation.

Pushing the collaboration between human and computer allowed machine learning to be incorporated into this project. This was in the form of a StyleGan, which is a generative adversarial network (GAN). It takes what it learns through studying thousands of images of the same subject and creates its own interpretation; thus creating something truly original.

Usually, this program is used in the context of creating original character faces in video games, however, this was applied to my “New” typeface. In the process of the StyleGan, learning to interpret the user's input (my type), it must first observe a large database of visual content, in this case, it was a collection of bird illustrations. Further experiementation allowed motion videos to be created, which morph in between my typeforms and external images of the bird lifecycle.