TypeDrawing
Published by Christy Dena April 30th, 2005 in ASCII, HCTI, Text Art.
Following on the same theme of Amaztype is the creative software called TypeDrawing, released Jan 2005 by Hansol Huh. Huh has created a program that writes the words you enter on whatever angle you draw them. As you can see with my unimaginative rendition of WRT the initials are spelled out with the entire words. Others have ventured further and are viewable in a gallery on the site. You can upload your images and view their creation as an animation.
Obviously this sort of thing has been done a million times over the decades but I found the animation of the peice created quite interesting. I could see how others drew their shape and I felt admiration for their apparent skill. I didn’t see the scrunched nose as they concentrated, though, or hear the expletives as a corner is too sharp or the silence of no exhale because they’re not breathing. But I did see which part of the picture was created first, which second and which were singular sweeping gestures. I found that as compelling as the final point of the artwork.
[Warning: you will need to enable popups for the site.]
As I understand it, TypeDrawing as a particular brushwork aesthetic - width as a way of indicating gestural acceleration. Thus
slow mouse = timid gesture = small type
fast mouse = bold gesture = large type
This works in brushwork if the fast hand is also a pressing hand - that is, in some ways this is a substitute for a pressure-sensitive tablet interface. On the other hand, I wonder about wiring the algorith the opposite way, as if it were a drippy watercolor brush:
slow gesture = spreading drip = large type
fast gesture = light smear = small type
I find the equivalency between speed and font size more interesting than the kind of equivalency, I suppose. I haven’t played with Illustrator for a while, but don’t most vector graphics suites with pressure tablet support allow you to do something like this kind of “font brush”? If this is a web-reimplementation of just one such feature, I suppose this would go towards Lev Manovich’s arguments that software editing suites are the great art of our time.
Of course, there is something compelling about any feature of a complex system when separated and considered in isolation….