Selected Foreign Objects

Foreign Objects is a 100-day project created by Yaren Kaya within SVA Masters in Branding program. It operates under the prompt of critiquing the othering of identities through names and characters deemed “alien” by Western eyes. The issue at hand goes far beyond mispronunciation or not speaking the language. It’s the prejudice towards anything east of “normal” coloring perception. When people alienate you by applying a distorted image of otherness onto your identity, it re-brands how you are perceived; Foreign Objects uses distorted typography as a constant to communicate identity and its relationship with skewed views of others layered upon it.

baden-württemberg wind music association visual identity

blow your own trumpet

when a music association wants a visual identity, the best approach is to go straight to the heart of the matter – in this case, music. this involved looking at how music is written down and translating that principle into a typeface. the diverse forms and symbols of different musical notation styles were used to develop a new system perfectly attuned to the subject in hand. job done. ta-da!

project team: filip antunović, maks barbulović, dominik bissem (project manager), carolin himmel, andreas uebele

principle typeface:
own, starter by tobias hoenow

Extended Ecologies

Extended Ecologies is a one-year, joint programme between Medrar in Cairo and the Critical Media Lab (CML) in Basel that aims to create and reflect the ways that extended reality (XR) technologies can transform our relationship with physical environments, and so ourselves and other beings.

Hisha Font

Hisha is a display font made at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (Ljubljana, Slovenia) under mentorship of Prof. Domen Fras and Tch. Asst. Alja Herlah. It is a student work made as a proposal custom font for Švicarija gallery in Ljubljana. It was inspired by architecture and rich history of the building where the gallery is located. It is a modular font whose glyphs were made using only three shapes. Those shapes are either connected, separedated, flipped or rotaded by 90 degrees in order to form a glyph.

Graphic Identity of Caminhos do Cinema Português

In this project, we developed the identity for the film festival Caminhos do Cinema Português. The visual identity had a large typographic component that sought to imitate the plasticity of the projection used in movie theatres. The text used in the posters was project in different types of materials and the modified composition was used to create the final posters, creating a very varied look in all the posters.

Stop using plastic!

Since the era of the industrial revolution, man has continued to introduce hazardous materials into the environment at an alarming rate. One of our biggest problems now is plastic. Plastics and their byproducts are littering our cities, oceans, and waterways, and contributing to health problems in humans and animals. I wanted to make an alarming shouting message, a wake-up call in an ignorant society.
The approach is entirely typographic, a package of mass production with plastic 3D letters is presented on the poster. Through this poster, I want to support organizations addressing plastic pollution and spread the word to a wide audience. Stop using plastic!

Generating Typography with Autoencoders III

Type Design is a domain that multiple times has profited from the emergence of new tools and technologies. This domain has received an even greater push with the increasing adoption of generative and AI. tools to create more diverse and experimental fonts. In this work, We created a dataset of letter skeletons from a collection of existing fonts and trained a Variational Autoencoder and Sketch Decoder to generate new ones by exploring the latent space. This process also allows us to control the style of the resulting skeletons and interpolate between different characters. Finally, we developed new glyphs by filling the generated skeletons based on the original letters’ stroke width.

Future

What the future holds for us? The best way to predict the future is to create it. Be part of the Future…Design Now!

“The future belongs to those who can imagine it, design it, and execute it. It isn’t something you await, but rather create.”
HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid

Generating Typography with Autoencoders II

Type Design is a domain that multiple times has profited from the emergence of new tools and technologies. This domain has received an even greater push with the increasing adoption of generative and AI. tools to create more diverse and experimental fonts. In this work, We created a dataset of letter skeletons from a collection of existing fonts and trained a Variational Autoencoder and Sketch Decoder to generate new ones by exploring the latent space. This process also allows us to control the style of the resulting skeletons and interpolate between different characters. Finally, we developed new glyphs by filling the generated skeletons based on the original letters’ stroke width.

Generating Typography with Autoencoders

Type Design is a domain that multiple times has profited from the emergence of new tools and technologies. This domain has received an even greater push with the increasing adoption of generative and AI. tools to create more diverse and experimental fonts. In this work, We created a dataset of letter skeletons from a collection of existing fonts and trained a Variational Autoencoder and Sketch Decoder to generate new ones by exploring the latent space. This process also allows us to control the style of the resulting skeletons and interpolate between different characters. Finally, we developed new glyphs by filling the generated skeletons based on the original letters’ stroke width.

Photomaton

Photomaton is a tailor-made interactive museological experience that automatically creates typographic portraits of people. Using computer vision algorithms and non-deterministic generative techniques, Photomaton enables users to create their typographic portrait and combine it with their favourite text on the exhibition. During the creation of each portrait, thousands of letters are strategically positioned, rotated, and scaled to recreate a snapshot of the users’ faces. Since this process is not deterministic, each generated portrait is unique and unrepeatable. It was developed for an exhibition of Portuguese literature, taking into account its space, nature and target audience.

Typographic Tapestry

Typographic Tapestry weaves together pixel pattern fonts and optical illusions to create abstract visuals. Powered by a Python script, it exports individual shapes as gradients, which can then be layered using a Risograph printer. This way alternative way of typesetting turns ordinary ASCII text into vibrant compositions.

Flow

The ‘Flow’ poster is an expression of experimental typography through the use of Risograph printing. The project aimed to experiment with legibility by incorporating slanted, hand-drawn letters inspired by old Cyrillic styles.

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Fax experiments without the fax machine – playing with thermal paper, stencils, and chemical reactions.

Much of my work explores mixing analogue and digital tools as a creative process. When I deploy analogue techniques, it’s about me adding noise and getting some feeling back into the work. Digital can just be so clinical. Sometimes I like that, but at other times I want grit, a depth or texture that’s ‘real’, not a coded imitation. It feels like I’m trying to dirty things up, break them, and get them to a point where they feel used, like an old record or book that shows signs of use.

Vearge Variable Font

I set out to create a transition between functional and experimental typography. “Vearge Variable Font” provides a seamless transition from a linear static reading font to an experimental constructed font. This results in many possibilities for application. For more visit: www.vearge.de

Fragmentz of Reality

The typographic experiment is based on the idea that our experience of reality is often incomplete or fragmented due to our limited perceptions, biases, and other factors that shape our understanding of the world. This fragmented view of reality may lead us to perceive only a small part of the larger picture, and to form incomplete or inaccurate beliefs about the world around us.

Diplomky_21

Diplomky 21 is a graduation show of students of the Faculty of Art and Design in Ústí nad Labem. The central motif for 2021 was a typographic game with the letters of the word Diplomky. The main communication medium is a poster printed with two-color screen printing on gold paper, it was supplemented by other printed and electronic promotional materials, exhibition graphics and an orientation system in the faculty building. Part of the work on the visual style of Diplomky 21 was also a printed catalog of graduates of the master’s degree. The visual style combined two colors – gold (in print) and blue (in digital use).