Week 6: typographic tests relating to homeless people's stories

During my easter research, I looked at campaigns made to tackle homelessness, and in general, at campaigns about homelessness made by different NGO's or institutions. What I saw is that a vast majority of them used homeless peoples faces (photographs) as the core element of their campaign, and that those faces were always similar (wrinkles, tired expression, etc...). When thinking about how I wanted to present homeless people in my website, I clearly knew I didn't wanted to fall in the cliché of using homeless people faces, and started to think about other ways of presenting them.

As my project is based in language and the use of language to communicate and connect with others, as a tool to establish conversations, I thought about using typefaces to present each of the homeless persons. Each homeless person participating on the program would have 1 specific typeface that would relate to their story in the way it was created.

Here are the first four initial tests I did, some of them also including previous visual tests that I did over Easter and that inspired some of these typefaces:

Ashley's

For Ashley's typeface I focused on the lack of space, and the feeling of claustrophobia or anxiety this lack of space can cause. Ashley lives and sleeps in her car with her daughter and her dog, where they also have all their stuff. They have the bare minimum space someone can live in, and I wanted that to be the idea for her typeface.

What I tried to do is to give the letterforms a limited space to exist in (a rectangle of 400mm x 100mm), where they needed to touch every side of the rectangle. That made the letters feel as if they were squeezed, kind of limited at the top and at the bottom where they couldn't expand, similar to how Ashley is "trapped" in her car, that is the only space she has to live in and needs to adapt to it.

Two previous visual tests that inspired this typeface:

Belinda's

For Belinda's typeface, I thought about how women who have suffered from domestic violence or abuse, or have had their daughters be victims of it have the need to escape from that, how they have no option but to leave their houses or their relationships for them to be safe. That's what happened to Belinda, who left her house with just her daughter and that led her to homelessness.

I wanted to translate that in the typeface, by making part of the letterforms "escape" from the other part of the letterforms, move forward and leave behind part of them.

Previous visual tests that inspired this typeface:

Bruce's

For Bruce's typeface what I wanted to translate is how his life just broke apart after his parents discovered his homosexuality, and how his life just broke into different pieces that didn't match between them anymore, and how his life was kind of loosing sense in a way.

In the typeface, I just divided the letterforms into different little pieces and moved those little pieces to the sides, for them not to match with each other and make the whole thing feel fragile and "broken".

Previous visual tests that inspired Bruce's typeface:

Spencer's

For Spencer's typeface, I wanted to focus on how fragile his life was the whole time, how before even falling into homelessness, he already know it could happen at any moment. I also wanted to show how his life just "broke" all of a sudden, when he started to do drugs, and how this changed his whole life.

Translated into a typeface, that meant having really fine strokes for echa of the letterforms, to show fragility and instability which are two main issues present in Spencer's life, as well as having the letter "breaking" or at one point, to show how an event can change all of your life, as it does in here with the letterforms and the positions of the strokes.