Regarding my iteration experiment on the first week, I straightforwardly customised the typed letter ‘sad’ and ‘joy’ to make them more emotional by using the functions of Illustrator. For example, I applied distortion, twist or blur to express the metaphor of sadness with tears, disappointment, or lethargic feelings. However, it was not clear to observe whether these designs could contribute to showing them more emotion since the words already told their emotions.

Consequently, I continued my experiments to randomly put these effects on each letter from A to Z and numbers. Then I made general sentences to investigate whether the design truly could show sadness emotion. As a result, these sentences have some emotions. However, it shows not only just sad feelings but also other feelings like anger or confusion. This situation happens especially the meaning of words is positive and/or neutral. 

In addition, human emotions are also complex, and it seems to be connected to their personality. Therefore, I would like to explore the relations between existing typefaces, which still have their personalities, and human emotions as further projects. At the same time, I also put a single effect on all letters to make typefaces coherent and see the possibility of expressing one emotion more boldly.

Reference:

• Branding for industrial designer, Tej Chauhan by Mark Stuckert
• ‘Pentagram redesigns Virgin Money as a ‘playful, joyful’ brand’ / Creative Boom
• Experimental Alphabet Type Research by Afrika
• Slanted Magazine #40—Experimental Type
• Group Font sees 37 very different creatives contribute a letter / It’s nice that
• 2019 Communication Design Judge’s Choice: Typeface that Varies with Emotion / tdc
• emotional gamut / akshita chandra
• The Psychology of Fonts (Fonts That Evoke Emotion) / envato tuts+
• Emotion and language – When and how comes emotion into words? / Mario Braun

Thinking about my position regarding the visualisation of emotions, I am curious about complex feelings and/or sensations, such as synesthesia, as a personal topic. In daily life, people express their emotions through verbal, facial, vocal, and/or bodily expressions, for example. However, only verbal and visual are commonly used in digital/cyber communication, the main form of communication nowadays. I would like to focus on an aspect of this, conveying emotions through textual communication, and particularly the connection between typefaces and emotions.

Regarding the first research step, I read about the meaning of emotions. Some examples of their definitions are evaluative, positive or negative experience, mental states, such as mood or temperament, and a cognitive process. Mental states can be categorised by words like happy, sad, or angry, and people can understand what emotions they have intuitively. However, wouldn’t emotions be more complex, abstract and unique? Even if there are many words that can express the details of our feelings, using only verbal communication and some emoji is not enough. For example, from my point of view, the sadness of today and yesterday is not the same.

So I created 50 design patterns of sad with distortion, twist and blur effects and another 50 patterns of joy with colour, motif, 3d and calligraphy, using Illustrator as my first iteration.