Week 4: Visual tests

Visual test nº1:

This is an improvement of the visual test nº2 (3rd week post), where I was looking at how homeless people are a collective that is left apart from society, that stands to the side of it and which public authorities and governments tend to forget about. I translated that idea into a typeface with letterforms that are missing one of their strokes or parts of it, symbolizing that part of society formed by homeless people who is forgotten/left to the side. The letterforms then become incomplete, and some of them become even hard to be recognized. The idea is to make us think how we can't afford to leave homeless people apart in society, how without them, things don't work as they should.

Visual test nº2

An extension of the previous idea and visual test, this time using video, to show movement and make the idea more clear visually. Also started to play with materials and colors.

Visual test nº2

This visual test works on the same idea that the previous ones, focused on showing how homeless people are often let apart by society, forgotten. The letterforms feel as if they were moving, but forgetting part of them in that movement, kind of decomposing themselves. This visual test is way less successful than the previous one, as I think the idea I wanted to transmit doesn't really show in the typography, and some letterforms have a weird effect, some of them even looking really similar to the "standard" letterforms.

Visual test nº3

Here I started to look at optical illusions and how those could be introduced into typography. Looking at making letterforms in 3D, to be able to have various sides for every letterform, and play with those different sides that could have different meanings, or could be hiding something, or revealed later on. This are just some initial drawings to allow myself to see how those would work, as it 3D drawing is something pretty new for me. I'd like to take this aspect of optical illusions much further, for which I'll do more testings this next few days, also using paper to actually build the letters.

Using optical illusions in my process is to talk about how homelessness is something that lots of people see in a different way from which it really is, with lots of preconceptions about it. The same idea is encountered in optical illusions where we see something that might not be real, or we see a distortion of reality.

Visual test nº4

This test is looking at how the homeless community is a really diverse community, homeless people being all very different, all having different backgrounds, different stories and issues. There is absolutely not an average homeless person, and I wanted to translate that into type by using strokes of very different widths in each letterform. I also started to test with materials and colors for this test, using brown paper I had at home, that looks similar to cardboard, a material really related to homelessness.

Visual test nº5

This is I think one of my most successful visual tests for the moment, as I think it works well visually but also conceptually. This font is focused on reflecting how a vast majority of homeless people have an extremely hard personal life, both before, during and after homelessness. Lots of them have little or no family support, no job, problems with addictions, health problems, difficult or violent backgrounds, exclusion problems, and a long etc... of problems that tend to cumulate and bring them to be homeless, which at the same time just make their already hard situation worse. It seems as if nothing in their lives matched/worked, lots of them being unable to find their way. That's what I wanted to reflect through this type, where the strokes of the letterforms are "broken" and nothing matches.

Visual test nº6

This test wasn't very successful visually, as I feel you don't really know what's happening, some letterforms aren't clearly visible, and although it shows that sense of chaos and reduced space, I feel like I need to be more ambitious with it, maybe be bring it out of the paper and try to replicate that idea of small spaces and and chaos into a physical thing. The idea with this visual test was to reflect on the reality of homeless people who live in their cars in California: often more than one person sleeps in the car, what becomes really claustrophobic.

Visual test nº7

This visual test has a similar idea to the previous one, working on how claustrophobic it can result to be homeless sometimes, with homeless people living in their cars, in extremely small shared rooms, packed shelters, etc... The idea here is to make the letterforms fit into the allocated squares, all of different proportions, and see how the letterforms can be deformed and how they can adapt to the space they have to fit in. I think this visual test would benefit from being digitalized, as the proportions in a computer are exact and it would allow the letterforms to be deformed much more, to more of an extreme.

Visual test nº8

In this other visual test I explored how to represent the vast diversity of people that are homeless, how diverse the homeless community is and how different the stories of everyone are. This time, I tried to express that idea by the use of colour, as well as "items" placed inside the letters. I think this visual test could be taken further if the colours started to have a meaning, or a really special and meaningful relation between them (maybe thinking about black and white?).