The workflow is actually very similar to one of my own Scriptographer tools, about which I’ve written a small post here. The number of primitives have been expanded recently as well as the addition of a new feature here and there. Although the fonts created will probably be best suited as display fonts, I think it’s a really nice tool where one can try out various ideas without much trouble. It’s also great fun to just browse the multitude of user submitted fonts for inspiration. I will definately try out some ideas once my computer is working properly again…

As you can see this results in a circle divided into 7 equal parts. Below, I have chosen to draw the letter ‘d’ which has a binary unicode value of ’1100100′. Well actually the correct value should be ’01100100′, eight digits, but somehow javascript omits the first ’0′ in standard Latin-1 as a letter from the extended Latin-1 such as ‘ö’ has a value of ’11110110′. Therefore, for now, my script will only print characters in the range of 32-127.

I have also added some functions to my script to set a number of values. These values determines the look of the cipher when printed, such as how much space between each character, the radius of each circle and line width ranging from 0.1pt to twice the radius (as in the example above, forming circle sectors).

Here is the output of the same Lorem Ipsum text but with three different styles.

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…

Very simple, but I do think that it has some nice qualities.

I added some extra features as well. Such as choosing just one singular color R, G, B, C, M or Y. As seen below.

Other options control how many concentric circles there would be (ranging from 1-5 or Random) and a size parameter. As I said earlier this has just been an exercise to help myself overcome some kind of creative block. Better be doing something than doing nothing at all.

The idea of making something, preferably complex, out of a limited set of rules, principles or objects is very appealing to me. It’s like art sprung out of (almost) nothingness. It’s called synergy – when the sum is greater than its parts. I think these patterns adresses just that; very simple and mundane geometric shapes, but put together, they create something more with seemingly infinte possibilities of variation.

Now, I thought about this for a while, wondering if I had the patience to construct my own symbols and shapes and turn them into a working font, I finaly decided I had not. What would be the point, it’s been done already. Although, I had one concern, as all these symbols where made as fonts there isn’t a very intuitive way to rotate a symbol or flip it around its own axis. Sure, it isn’t that hard to flip a character around, but say if there are a 1000 different symbols it becomes time consuming and counterproductive.

My solution to this problem was to create a script which allowed me to type with objects instead of letters. Each object would be assigned to a specific letter with the added ability to rotate and flip each object during typing using the arrowkeys.

This way I could reduce the number of objects to a minimum.

I added some other features as well. I can navigate around the artboard using the arrowkeys or simply clicking anywhere with the mouse. The script calculates the right position to line up the objects perfectly, it also takes any tile spacing into consideration, should there be any.

Fonticon works really well and can be alot of fun to play around with, building a picture from the ground up. I would say that this is a much more intuitive way of building patterns and you don’t have to make all your shapes and symbols into a working font either so the workflow should be faster. The only problem, and a pretty big one at that, is that I currently haven’t figured out an easy way to colorize them since each object is actually several small objects grouped togehter with a transparent “frame”.