ux readings

post-war post-modernity eliminated the quest for one-size-fits-all communication and paved the way for user research and tailored messaging.

the difference between tailored and tailorable is the difference between the designer targeting a certain sort of person with the message and the designer providing a message that can be customizable by the target audience themselves.

the voice of a community should be listened to very carefully during the research phase and then respectfully parroted back in such a way as to capture the attention of the targeted audience and prove the designed material credible enough to be worth their curiosity.

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in keeping with the patterns of change in communication and technological growth, the more globally connective design work is, the more important it becomes to identify the tiny local touches that make it real. there's more identifiable in someone else's hometown than there is in a corporate voice trying to speak to everyone, everywhere at once.

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coca-cola, whether they realized it or not, is one of the biggest design entities in the world. i totally believe it. they are one of the most profound and iconic brands on the planet, peddling a lifestyle right along with their soda. much of their success has come with the fact that their identity has always been so clear and distinct, so specific and charactered, the most recent "open happiness" campaign in particular. this is a great example on the power of clarity and articulation.

poetry alphabet

another curiosity i decided to pursue was what i could do with the stories themselves that people gave me, and whether there was something in the word choice that made them emote the feeling that they did.

i've been creating poetry typefaces out of phrases that appear in people's writing samples to combine and recombine into not only experimental typography but experimental text. for instance, this is the alphabet in my happy poetic font.

here it is in action. the following simply says "text:"

this font allows for two layers of meaning, the secretive input text that cannot be translated without a decoder, and the repetitive/remixed output text. i'm really excited about this part.

happy type

while the duplication of letterforms helps reinforce the feeling in the angry type sample, when it came to happy, it became more confusing. it still seemed happy to me, because i knew what i was looking for, but i had to realize that multiplied, overlaid text is a signifier for anger, no matter how happy it looked to me compared to the angry sample.

here's what happy looked like overlaid:

it's so swirly and curly and bubbly! but that overlapping just wouldn't do. so for this type sample, i took my artistic license to average the letterforms myself into one path each. i took this new alphabet and used it to create my happy typeface, again with the lowercase being a pre-happy and the uppercase being a post-happy alphabet, lending the caps to a new level of excitement.

here it is in action:

angry type

having improved my collection process, my prompts now go as follows:

1. please write the alphabet.
2. please tell me a story about a time you were (feeling).
3. please write the alphabet again.

i asked for both upper and lowercase, but in some cases, people's mistakes were very telling, such as the neglect of a lowercase during the angry experiment.

this is what everyone's angry handwriting looks look put together:

and this is the typeface i constructed utilizing a compilation of pre-angry samples for the lowercase and post-angry samples for the uppercase. the reason for this distinction being our use of capital letters for emphasis, so, in the case of someone being angry, caps are often construed as shouting or screaming.
this gives an example of type in lowercase and then an example of type in uppercase.

here's an example of the typeface in action, emphasizing a word using the caps system.