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.