Created by Yannick Assogba and Jason Lewis; the quick brown fox aims to create a font whose glyph shapes are amenable to organic transformation informed by the vocal characteristics of a speakers voice.Amplitude and pitch information is extracted from the audio signal and mapped to transformations on the glyphs of a base font which are then blended into the current state of the typeface.

The blending of the glyphs is done using techniques inspired by genetic programming. The architecture also allows for multiple instances of a particular glyph to evolve in parallel (i.e. the font can evolve multiple glyphs for a particular letter with different appearances).

The title of the piece is the beginning of a common english pangram and holds particular meaning to me because it is a sentence I was made to write over and over again as a child in order to "improve" my handwriting. This project uses repetition to breed difference, rather than create uniformity. As such the projects attemps to address issues of identity and personality within digital typographic space. It also suggests one possibility of how writing can become performance.

"The history of typography reflects a continual tension between the hand and the machine, the organic and the geometric, the human body and the abstract system" - Ellen Lupton

Media

References

SoftType / Jason Lewis :: Prosodic Font / Tara Rosenberger Shankar :: Genotyp / Michael Schmitz