Final Thouhts
The medium is the message, and typography is that medium. Our world is inundated with a plethora of digital and physical typography, but communication contains a spectrum of emotional and situational context. To deal with this essential part of communication both the medium and the message has developed means to convey the finer point of conversation. The message has developed grammar and punctuation, allowing for context and emotion in some degree. The medium, typography, has developed along subtler lines. Designers will claim that a geometric sans serif is harsher feeling and colder than a humanist serif. That Garamond feels classical and sophisticated whereas Helvetica feels corporate and devoid. And in some incredibly slight way they’re correct, but type is often just not very expressive. This lack of expression isn’t for lack of trying, it's just the simple reality that type has been paired down from imagery to iconography to basic geometric form. And basic geometric form can only be given so much emotion before it becomes neither basic nor unobtrusive as a medium. My explorations attempted to give the medium specific emotion. At first I sought to interpret the writer's emotion through trackable points such as typing speed, deletion, word usage. I hoped that by defining characteristics of typing for each emotion I could interpret it and then alter the typeface to be more like that emotion. For example say a customer is writing an angry review, as they writing it they remember how angry the faulty product made them and they channel that anger into their writing. Because of this they begin to type faster than average, the system takes note. Since they’re writing fast they begin to misspell things and have to go back and retype several words, the system notices. Then in typical angry internet fashion the customer uses the medium to try and appear angrier, using all caps in their tirade, the system again takes note. As the system recognizes these indicators of anger such as typing speed, spelling, and capitalization it begins to alter the typeface to suit the customer’s emotion. The x-height gets taller and the typeface gets bolder appearing heavier and angrier. The typeface all caps more words and adds #@!$% to show more anger. The medium is now attempting to alter itself and better convey the meaning of the message. Readers are very aware of minute changes in text, we’ve all been trained to, because grammar is contingent upon it. Seeing all these changes would hopefully convey the mood of the writing instead of just stating in the text. The issue with this concept comes from several sources. People have very ingrained mental models of how typing works, the largest being that they have control. Second due to the technical limitation of typefaces function it's just not feasible without some intense workarounds. And lastly after learning some Python I realized that what I wanted to do was far outside my skills. So I changed the focus. I changed from trying to imbue a typeface with your emotion to the choice being yours. Instead I designed a typeface that you would use if you had decided that you were trying to convey a certain emotion, sadness in this case.