Project #1 - Part C: Bell Gothic Word Visualization

Visually communicating the meaning of a word can be difficult, especially when the word is a noun rather than a description of an action or appearance. For this part of the project, we were tasked with designing a visual design that communicates word meanings through pure use of the font we had previously researched.

Aside from predetermined word lists, as well as font and color restrictions, we were free to experiment with our designs including changes to position, rotation, scale, negative and positive space, and opacity within a square frame.

The two words I had chosen for this task were Symbiosis and Transition, after which the hand drawn sketches began.

Very rough brainstorming sketches

The first designs that began to emerge from my mind were for symbiosis, and so the drawings at A1 through D2 were experiments with different ways to display its meaning. The first meaning of the word that came to mind was a parasitic relationship, where one living organism survives by consuming its host, and so the A1 drawing was planned as a letter 's' acting as host and 'ymbiosis' as the parasite. The drawing B1 is a continuation of this meaning of the word with more letters as hosts and single letters as parasite.

Other designs that came to mind were for the more peaceful forms of symbiosis, such as where two organisms can live in harmony. This was difficult to imagine a simple visualization for, and so C1 was a weaker design where letters of one word are shared with the next word. This idea was also used again in D2 in another way that was again not strong enough to convey the message.

Another image that came to mind with this definition was based on the relationship between sharks and small fish which swim under them. This lead to a depiction of a shark using letters to form the shark, the small fish, and the seaweed at the bottom of the frame. This idea stuck with me and so I tried a modified version of it in B2.

The designs in A2 and C2 are based on other visual images, where a handshake vector graphic inspired the first and the second was similar to the well known symbol for recycling. These designs would focus more on using text to fill a shape, in an attempt to stray from the more minimalist designs that did not produce favorable results.

The strongest ideas for symbiosis were therefore A1, for its use of negative space to demonstrate that the parasite is eating away at the host, and B2 for the graphic way of representing the shark purely using text characters rather than filling a shape with smaller text.

The next group of designs were for the word transition, and were also difficult to imagine in the form of a still image. Initial designs such as A3, B3, B4, A5, and B5 were based on the idea of the text transitioning between different rotations, scales, and positions but were very chaotic and did not communicate the meaning well. A similar issue occurred in A4 which, although it filled the space well, did not translate well into the meaning of the word.

Other designs that weren't quite strong enough were opacity experiments D3, C4 and D5, as well as experiments in scale for C3 and C4. With the other ideas eliminated, the final layout designs for transition were ultimately based on B4 and C3, due to their minimalism and use of space.

The initial designs were all drawn on a single A4 sheet and so they could only communicate the most modest of details, but elements from many of the small sketches can be seen in each of the final designs.