ABOUT

Typographical development has always been closely related to its era — the technologies, production techniques, the economics, and the shifting cultural and societal opinions. Despite humanity’s bounding technological developments, typographic design has reached a standstill. They have remained the same static letterforms that humans passively read for decades. While typography is the pinnacle of communication in our lives, it is something that hasn’t developed further than its 2D form.

I propose that a way to reignite the development of typography in our era is to make it responsive. Humans document streams upon streams of data everyday that we base our everyday decisions on due to our dedication to technology, and have thus in turn created an “information overloaded” environment. My challenge is to impose live data — such as temperature, pollution, traffic and wind speed — treating these as my x-variables and use them to change letterforms to everchanging and evolving pictograms. This will in turn allow typography to become something to actively interact with. This makes this app a bridge between information design and type design, by using live data as a catalyst to changing the appearance and form of typographical letter forms. I plan to do this by taking a pre-existing typeface (ie. Aktiv Grotesk from the Dalton Maag Foundry with its varying degress of expanded and condensed qualities) applying the system I will decide with my live variables to the letters in order to change it. This in turn will feature in an app based upon typographic interpretation of these weather variables in order to quickly communicate the numerical data in a quick, interesting and different way.