Someone scribbled some incomprehensible symbols on a wall at my work some time ago. I have no clue what it reads or if they are even real letters. Probably just the work of some bored-out-of-his-wits zombie drone. Nevertheless, they looked somewhat real to me and seemed to follow some kind of inherent system. I let this percolate for some time until finally, the other day, I started to sketch out some very basic glyphs, as I had my morning coffee at Wayne’s sometime around two pm.

I quickly came up with 15 different types of symbols to be used as pairs, one upper and one lower. I subsequently organized them in a table and had the color coded like this.

The blue are glyphs that never will be used for reasons I will go into further down. Red and green are glyphs that are duplicates and the gray are totally unique. As my script works now I use all but the blue glyphs.

Now, the script just randomly picks two glyphs and puts one on top of the other. Nothing more than that. Well, other than I don’t need to have them pre-made as illustrator objects as each one of the 15 glyphs just exists as sequence of four ones and zeros in an array. The numbers tells the script what side, or sides, of a square will be drawn. Get it?

Well, like this.

First image is just to show in what order the sides will be read. The second image represents a glyph that in my array consequently would read 1100.

In order to not have the script draw the same line twice – as is the case with the blue ones – I put this rule in that don’t allow the upper glyphs third side and the lower glyphs first side to pair up. Got that?

First pair is not allowed, instead there are two other combinations to choose from.

Aside from that, I put in a bunch of other features such as, glyph size, stroke width, stroke caps, glyph spacing, number of glyphs, a unique glyphs only-button et cetera…

Thick stroke, square caps and tight spacing.

Slim Stroke, square caps and tight spacing.

Thick stroke, round caps and tight spacing.

Well, if anything it does kinda resemble some sort of alien sci-fi font… for whatever time I would need one…