My advisor
John Maeda taught a course in Digital Typography, and this project
was my solution to one of the weekly assignments. The assignment
centered around creating a vector based font, which is a description
of letterforms where each letter is described by a small set of
variables instead of a complete description of the bitmap pattern.
I decided to use my variables to encode a simple physical simulation
of a path of a bouncing ball. An editor was made where roughly
10 variables including initial position, initial speed, and the
force of gravity could be changed, which allowed me to define
each letter. A separate viewer program allowed me a sentence dynamically
rendered in the ball font.
The use of
the same physical simulation to define each letter both gives
the font an aesthetic coherency and a means of playfully rendering
the creation of a sentence on the screen. The movie shows both
the editor being used to define a letter and the viewer program
drawing a sentence. The slide shows several letters being edited,
and one screenshot of the viewer after is has completed its drawing.
You can run this applet to make your own characters and sentences.
