Feedback of the last week

In the third week, I created a publication about the emotional progress of my trip to Santorini, from starting to plan to the final day. I also made a block calendar where people can express their everyday feelings through typeface designs of the number. 
The main feedback was that the block calendar works better than the publication to express my complexity of feelings through typeface design since I adopted visual systems. However, it is still limited to expressing emotions because the calendar only has the number as verbal information. So I decided to create a modular typeface design for the next exploration.

Experiment with modular typeface

In the modular typeface experiment, I followed the ‘form-based flexible visual systems’ from the book (pp.85). The author introduces simple regulations of a form-based visual system with geometric shapes in this chapter. In order to increase the variety of the outcome, the author recommends cutting geometric shapes and assembling them again by rotating and mirroring. So as the first step, I created essential components for the typeface design, like the picture below. After creating components, I made a few letters by mixing them and observed modular typeface could express emotion.

In the following step, I added colours to the modular typeface to set the direction of emotions from positive to negative. In order to add colours, I created five different colour combinations, which idea comes from the book, ‘Design and Emotion: The Experience of Everyday Things’. 

The book introduces the workshop to explore colour mood boards by combining colours. The given emotive words: depression, passion, tranquillity, neutrally, and aggression, come from the reference book. I connected three colours intuitively and applied each letter to express the diversity of the emotion. Then the modular typeface becomes more powerful in conveying various emotions than the black version.

However, I observed that not only colours but also the shape of components should have a wider variety for using abstract shapes, like the most negative version below.

Through the feedback, I’ve got the idea to create a more organic version, which may not keep legibility but has some emotional impression. Additionally, I feel that the balance of the typeface design between discipline and chaos is the key to creating the latest modular typeface.