Explorative play is a non-linear process critical for enhancing a designer’s creativity and ability to ideate unconventional solutions.
This idea is important because exploring unconventional ideas leads to innovations and new perspectives. Play helps designers put more of their point of views into their work. We create based on their worldviews, discoveries, and past experiences. Our process and way of working become crucial to our designs and what we decide to put out into the world. So, rather than creating carbon copies of other designs, the designer’s work has its own voice.
Play helps designers put more of their point of views into their work. We create based on their worldviews, discoveries, and past experiences. Our process and way of working become crucial to our designs and what we decide to put out into the world. So, rather than creating carbon copies of other designs, the designer’s work has its own voice.
Inspired by the studio MuirMcNeil's and Dutch designer Jurriaan Schrofer's letterform experiments, I chose typography as my form of expression. Their approach to building fonts—abstracting, deconstructing, and recombining letterforms—allowed for new explorations and graphic possibilities.
My thesis deliverable is called Typamajig, a toy for designers to exercise their creativity by building their own letters. For other creative people, Typamajig may be the tool that pushes them past their creative blocks and be an effective making exercise. The objective is to rapidly iterate and discover the numerous possibilities of constructing different fonts out of basic parts; and, to have fun while doing so.
Typamajig's modular system allows for it the blocks to be infinitely expanded into different forms and colors. Each expansion set is inspired by an art or design movement, such as shown above: Bauhaus, Memphis, Constructivism, Art Nouveau.
