Week 5: Visual tests

Working on how homeless people are left apart/aside by society, how society has "abandoned" homeless people, I reworked on the idea of how to visualize that exclusion, that feeling of having been left behind with typography, as I already started doing last week. I focused on playing with the strokes and how some strokes can be essential to some letterforms to be recognized. Testing how can separating a stroke from its letterform look like or what happens if you directly eliminate one stroke from a letterform. Are the letterforms still recognizable? How important is one stroke for a letterform?

Also started to look at how I can make my typefaces look more "manual", "hand-made", or basically, less digital. Homeless people have little or no access to technology or any kind of digital platform, and I feel like a "pristine" digital letterform would look too removed from homelessness, too "strange" for them. I wanted to look at how to make those typefaces I started doing on weeks 3 and 4 feel more "manual", although staying digital in their format.

I also started to look at how to use those typefaces I made. I needed to start thinking about what the typefaces were going to be used for, what context would they be in, what do I wanted to communicate when using them? During my research, I wrote down some quotes I heard in interviews made to homeless people, which seemed quite powerful to me, that I thought delivered a strong message or illustrated the homelessness reality well. I then started using this sentences with my typeface, as I think using quotes from real homeless people would bring to my project that personal side that I've wanted to give my project since the beginning. In some form or another, when treating an issue like homelessness I feel like people who have suffered from it really need to be at the center of the project, and this was to me a good way of including that personal side of homelessness.

Another experiment, this time using a word play with the words homeless and heartless, that I could do a series of, as there are more words ending in -less and that would make sense to be used as speechless/soulless/hopeless.

Following the same idea of taking "parts" out of the letterforms, this visual test plays with how would a letterform look like if we could only see half of it? Half of the letterform is hidden, which connects with the idea of homeless people being left aside by society, as if they weren't there. Do we even notice them? Do we even notice half of the letterform is missing, or are we still able to read it?

Thinking about how to encourage conversation between society and homeless people, I started to think about letters, and how those have been a traditional and really common way of communicating between us (people). Especially when thinking about homeless people, who have little to not access at all to technology, I thought that letters could be a good way to establish a conversation between them and individuals in society.

I then started to look at how could I do to make people participate in that exchange, a way of making them feel excited to talk to homeless people, to take time to write to them. For that, I think that it would work well if the homeless person was the first one to write to that other person, and sent a letter talking about them, their life, etc... that could then be answered by the correspondent and that would be the starting point of a dialogue between those.

But, to retain the attention of the reader and try to make him as involved as possible in that exchange, the letter sent by the homeless person could be edited, in a way where parts of it are missing, they're just not there. It could be the most interesting parts of the letter, information that the reader absolutely wants to know, and that makes him feel obliged to answer to then get a response back with that information.

This is the same idea but with another "aesthetic"/presentation.

With the same idea of working with letters, I started to explore how could the reader get involved with the idea of sending letters to homeless people and establishing a dialogue with them, and working with the idea of how diverse the homeless community is and how many different stories and backgrounds homeless people have, I came up with the idea of making a letter that the reader would receive, but in which he would also participate by actually "building up" the letter, where different stories can be" fitted in". The reader has the opportunity to "imagine" the life of the homelesss people with options given to him. Once he has completed the letter and send it back, a homeless person fitting the characteristics that the reader has mentioned in his letter will get back to him, telling a bit more about his story and a dialog between them would start.

Thursday's pin up visual test:

Working on the idea of establishing a correspondence between homeless people and other members of society, using the format of a letter for the reasons that I mentioned above in the post, I decided to write myself what could be a letter from a homeless person telling his story and how he got to homelessness. As I can't interview or get in contact with any homeless people at the moment, I decided to look really. carefully at my research, to write that letter and choose the content that would be on it. My idea is to write several letters, with different stories, that cover lots of the different aspects of homelessness, as can be youth homelessness and LGTB+ homelessness, women homelessness, hidden homelessness, rough-sleeping, loss of job that leads to homelessness, etc...

For Thursday's pin up I chose to write on youth homelessness and more precisely LGTB+ homelessness, which is an aspect of homelessness I had explored in my research and from which I have some interviews and concrete examples in which my based my visual test on.

How the "system" of correspondence works is explained in one of the letters in here: