Live Typography 1

It is always interesting to explore new tools available for designing and creating. For the latest tools to become successful, it is often necessary for them to utilize a language already familiar to the user. This makes the learning curve faster and enables the user to create quickly. Take fore instance, the family of Adobe applications. The software maker works arduously to ensure continuity in their Creative Suite. The usual disadvantage of any tool (especially software) is that the finished products will suffer from similar tool marks. Artists will often find it useful to develop new tools to suit their particular needs. This appears to be the case for It’s Alive! .

By incorporating a virtually seamless interface between ASCII text and a vectorized version of it, bleeding edge typographical software is able to create dynamic designs on much deeper levels. It is possible to use more than the visual appearance of text to create an evocative design. The creator is able to utilize more humanistic aspect of text like meanings of words or turns of phrase. As mentioned previously, the user interface for interacting with such software is key to enabling the user to create diverse pieces. Peter Cho and Tom White’s filters for texts use similar techniques. Creating an algorithm capable of producing these effects could also be used in dynamic applications. Although It’s Alive!’s menu system is suitable for creating dynamic and specialized text effects; it may not be familiar to most users. This makes it more challenging to adopt the software for daily use in conjunction with related programs.

With the advent of more advanced operating systems as well as high performance consumer computers it is possible to easily harness built-in functions computer makers have developed for software makers. Apple’s Core image and Core Animation are examples of this technology. This may in fact encourage the development of a greater number of highly configurable artistic applications at a significantly low cost.

Links:

• Apple Core Animation (Part of the Core Services)
• Affordances – Don Norman

In response to the readings of:

• Maeda. Creative Code, pp. 81 – 95
• Lewis, Jason. "Writing-Designing-Programming: The NextText Project"