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FOREWORD Ellen Lupton
Around the world, artists and designers are experimenting with code. Rather than delineate the final outcome of a work, designers are creating flexible systems that yield unpredictable results. Often, a few simple conditions and processes combine to produce complex, intricate effects. Tiny elements swarm together to form larger structures. Simple geometric shapes and solids collide, deform and fragment to create new entities. Input harvested from data networks provides bodies of content upon which random operations can be performed. How do artists create these code-driven works? The open-source software application Processing has found its way into the hands of thousands of designers and artists worldwide. Created by pioneering software artists C.E.B. Reas and Ben Fry, Processing is a language, a tool, a medium and a vital social phenomenon. Conceived especially for visual artists, its elegant interface allows users to quickly envision, test and share results. Typography is the art of arranging letters in space and time. In this ubiquitous discipline, visual and verbal expression converge, leaving no literate person free from its beauty or tyranny. Typography encompasses the form of individual letters as well as their configuration into words, lines and texts. The alphabet and other writing systems are themselves a kind of code, translating the units of speech (whether sounds or words) into graphic marks. Transforming writing into a reproducible code, typography fixes the idiosyncrasies of the scribe with the uniformity of the machine. Typeface design has been automated in one fashion or another since the Industrial Revolution, when technologies such as the pantograph enabled designers to manufacture endless variations of a font based on a single core drawing. Similar tools spawned the proliferation of typeface designs during the phototypesetting revolution at mid-century and the massive digital revolution that followed.
Modern designers have long experimented with the forms of the alphabet, whether by radically simplifying its elements down to a minimal core or by allowing those elements to expand and proliferate into ornate or hypertrophied structures. Using code to generate unexpected letterforms is a recent evolution of this rich vein of visual research. This book was conceived, designed and produced by Yeohyun Ahn, John Corrigan and Viviana Cordova, three graphic design MFA students at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). The work began with a series of workshops and thesis explorations initiated at the school; when the team graduated, they continued their research and focused on sharing it with the public. The current volume is the result of several years of sustained effort by these dedicated designers and educators. By creating this guide, the authors hope to inspire other designers to engage with code and consider typography from a fresh perspective. The alphabet is there for remaking. Type + Code is published by MICA’s Center for Design Thinking, a research and publishing unit that works with MICA students and faculty to originate and disseminate ideas about design for a variety of audiences, from general readers to design professionals. The Center is proud to publish this book, our first print-on-demand publication conceived and implemented solely on the initiative of our MFA students.