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I am working on materials for a lecture and workshop I am planning, involving shapes that could be letters but are not, in fact, part of commonly recognised alphabets. These will be used to examine strategies for harmonising arbitrary shapes into sets, in the same way that we harmonise different letters into typefaces.

I have come up with some shapes myself, but I thought it would be interesting to invite Typophilers to contribute possible shapes. I can't promise to use them all, but if I use yours I will include your name in acknowledgements at the end of my lecture.

I am looking for roughly monoline shapes. They will be given to students, who will have the job of drawing the shapes in ways that harmonise with various type styles and scripts. I will post some images of the results here, and the students' responses to the experience will be incorporated into the lecture. I may revise the submitted shapes slightly, if I think this will provide particular kinds of challenges for the students that will increase the value of the exercise.

Images can be posted in this thread. Thanks in advance to anyone who chooses to participate.

1) Check out the insides of: http://typophile.com/courses/type101 and http://typophile.com/courses/type110 .
2) I have over a hundred "pseudo-letters" that I did for Trajic notRoman.
http://themicrofoundry.com/ss_trajic.html
They're not monoline, but you can easily see their structure.
3) You might get away with using actual letters from obscure alphabets. I'm thinking of things like Cherokee and IPA.
4) Matthew Carter made such letters a while back in support of font copyrighting efforts; they were supposed to illustrate the separation of design and utility. Not that the government was paying attention of course.

hhp

My modest proposal for a new uppercase germandbls glyph from this thread might work:

I guess I'm moving into some asian stuff, not really latin looking.

Something I doodled with several years ago. Looks a bit Cyrillic in places.

That's fine, Frode, the shapes don't have to look Latin, although I may tighten up some of the shapes to make things a little easier for the students.

There is a tricky second part to their assignment that I don't want to share yet. I like it when the second morning of a workshop begins with a collective groan of disbelief :)

This in the news today -

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/4357829/Immortal-jellyfish-swa...

- seems like it could be the basis of a symbol for immortality.

uppercase

lowercase

No matter my intentions, almost every glyph winds up being just an inverted or backwards version of an existing glyph..

Something of an aside: John, your description made me think of a workshop that Cyrus has conducted a couple times recently, which he calls "The Eleventh Digit." He describes a bit about it in the second half of this blog post: http://type101.fontbureau.com/archives/114

Tim Donaldson's got some cool 'coulda been' letters in his wonderful new book, Shapes for Sounds (Mark Batty Publisher)

His "family tree" approach to the historic development of the modern 'romalingian' glyph set also has a branch with three 'possible' leaves for each letter. Tim is a consummate pen-man (pace, Hrant) and his 'evolution' of the letters makes good use of that understanding.

See http://www.markbattypublisher.com/servlet/book_view?number=66

Cheers

PF

http://slowprint.com/almostfreelp (Almost Free Letterpress!)
http://fraterdeus.com - Galena, Illinois

Here's a couple odd characters from my notebooks...



http://tinyurl.com/pf-notebooks-01

Cheers!
pf

http://slowprint.com/almostfreelp (Almost Free Letterpress!)
http://fraterdeus.com - Galena, Illinois

This is pretty bad, but maybe it helps?
(From a school assignment to make "fantasy numerals", six years back.)

Err Codex Seraphinianus?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus

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Personal Art and Design Portal of Ivan Gulkov
www.ivangdesign.com

Hahahaha. Thanks, David, that is really a funny shape. It looks almost pronounceable. Shpa?

I don't have any image but italian designer Bruno Munari made something similar: scritture illegibili di popoli sconosciuti (illegible writings of unknown people). If I find some picture I will post here.

The great Max Ernst designed a book called Maximiliana in a phantasy script. Here is a little image (couldn’t find a bigger one right now).

Ah right, Alessio Leonardi made something like that too, his "Alberobanana" alphabet. There is some info on that here.

Hi John its a bit late in the evening here but I felt like making a few fun doodles!

Two more sources of invented letters that I remembered: Gurtler's singular "Experiments With Letterform & Calligraphy"; and Catich's "Reed, Pen and Brush Alphabets for Writing and Lettering".

hhp

John, I did a screengrab of the folder showing the thumbnails of the various experiments:

Many of these can be flipped to end up with more. In fact that might help because the Trajic forms are supposed to evoke actual letters, which you might not want.

(Note that at that point the outlines were generated with the "help" of Adobe's Trajan. But I've never sold a copy of Trajic -even though I was asked a dozen times- and my plan has always been to redraw the outlines myself if it came to distribution.)

hhp

John -- Shpa, or even shpal :)

From Russia with Light: