Design Challenge and Design Ideas

Humanistic typographic design has always sought to create systems to allow for the development of type that has a uniformity of style, these systems provided guides in the form of cap height, ascender, and descender lines. The problem with these guides is they are so often broken and provide no guidance of the similarity of form across the letter-forms. By breaking the different characters into the smaller micro-element and categorizing each character we create micro-elements and form a modular framework for designing type. This project sought to create a new modular type system that draws on a fixed number of elements to construct a typeface. The repetition of these elements allow for a uniform aesthetic emerge. This practice-based method can help designers, students or educators to explore how these modular elements can combine to demonstrate how you can build a modulator typeface from a fixed palette of visual elements.

How the brief was fulfilled

This study focuses on an ongoing research and production project that is exploring different approaches to generative type design. The research has progressed into the identification of particular elements and patterns within type design and the development of typeface based on these elements and patterns. While this typeface is in no way perfect, it can serve as a way to understand unity of form in typography design and enable those who wish to develop a face with a structure that will allow them to translate the elements from a small number of control glyphs to a full set of characters with a harmony and unity that make them a typeface.