Paper

ian tirone
behavioral typography

write a page or so (not including images) about this recurring typographic tendency or larger trend you observe from your research. how would you describe it? what are its traits? where did it begin? where does it appear? who’s doing it? why is it important?

The typographic tendency of user manipulated, digital, non-printable, screen based, flash driven, coded, unusable, silly, non-applicable, and otherwise intangible typography has started to show up more on the internet as experiments with letter-forms. These typographic experiments are not great in number, since this appears to be a relatively new practice, most likely evolving out of ideas of kinetic type, and typography that incorporates duration.
The umbrella term for this new typography would have to be something to the effect of “behavioral typography”. Meaning that a programmer, assigns a set of behaviors to a type that can then in some cases be manipulated and altered by the user based on the parameters the programmer has set up. This typography is wholly dependent upon the screen (and in some cases an input device) to function, since it is bound by the laws of duration. Input devices would include but are not limited to: a keyboard, mouse, touch screen, and/or microphone. Inherent traits in all these sorts of explorations are, in-formalism, and non-applicability. Meaning since the typography is dependent on user input, and the user may not always be a typographer, or a designer, or a visual person for that matter, the results tend to be less than visually appealing. Non-applicable meaning, the type has no built in purpose other than look what I can do.
I think the more structural issue with both of these “behavioral type” problems is than in the majority of cases these things are created by a programmer, or a team of programmers. This creates two distinct problems. 1. Programmers are not visual people, and therefore lack the abilities to create something aesthetically appealing, or to set up a situation in which it is possible to create something aesthetically appealing. 2. Programmers are not trying to solve problems in the way that a designer would. Rather, they just tend to do. They create things that make people go, “Ohhhhh, cool”, but in an overwhelming number of cases have failed to make anything better that wasn’t already working, or make something that is working easier.
Some of the people that I have discovered working in this field are Peter Cho, a company called Calligraft, Zach Lieberman, and Gicheol Lee. These people all appear to be programmers first and designers second. All their work can be found on the web, most of these experiments operate as a web based program, but some of them have also done installations in which the user input comes from the body of the user as captured by a camera, interpreted by a computer, and the results displayed on a projection.
This sort of experimentation is important to the design world, and world in general because it is a relatively new way to experience typography and interaction. The potential of behavioral type has yet to be fully explored, and is far from being fully realized as something with applicable purpose. The true purpose for this new typography is as of yet illusive. But may well have major impact if enough people start working on it and tinkering.