Jake Richardson

The speculative exhibition identity, hosted at the Barbican Centre, showcases work from various artists and designers whose work blurs the boundaries between DESIGN × ART. By using new processes and digital techniques, they create unique immersible experiences that lie between those two worlds which is reflected within the branding.

The exhibition itself acts as a gateway into a new voided space where Design and Art co-exist as equals and are blended together with no border. The portal-like visual is at the core of the visual identity with its mysterious organic shape that moves and creates a sense of ambiguity about what the exhibition might explore. The overall campaign focuses on the use of digital screens and the use of sound around London to display the gateway visuals, which create unique interactions with the audience within the environment and physical spaces.

SONICTYPE is a generative typeface inspired by sonic vibrations and human sound input. It breaks down the shapes of existing letterforms and translates them into abstracted sound waves creating unique generative outputs.

A coded web-based tool was created to make the generative letterforms and explores 4 parameters which affect the typeface's styles which are: SCALE, WIDTH, DENSITY, and STROKE.

The tool allows users to create their own designs based on their sonic input and has also been used to help design the printed type specimen which complements its web counterpart. The publication showcases the organic relationship between people, sound, and visual forms but in a printed format, referencing the tradition of printed music scores, and questioning how sound can be visualised in a static output. As a result, it has captured the experimental and responsive sonic typographic visuals created using the code and turned it into something more tactile and away from a digital screen.

‘Interactive Type’ is an online tool that uses different forms of interactivity to manipulate variable typography. The aim of the project was to explore the personal ways we can interplay with type and allow users to customise and generate their own typographic responses based on their own input. The 3 parameters users can explore with the typeface are Sound (reactive to audio input), Mouse (reactive to the cursor position) and Motion (reactive to face movement).

Users also have the ability to personalise the colour scheme of the type and overall UI design based on their own preferences. This adds another level of functionality to the tool as it could be used by designers to test the variable nature of typefaces alongside potential colour schemes for projects.