Inventing a futuristic alphabet, you had to dare! This Australian graphic artist has made a mixture of geometry and typography to imagine a language of the future. Don’t get me wrong, this Ph.D. is pretty serious.
Barry Spencer particularly enjoyed Latin while studying graphic design in Melbourne. It is surely this enthusiasm that allowed him to develop a passion for speculative typography. Barry Spencer attempts to explain this discipline:
« I tend to call any typeface that is Latin, or inspired by it, ‘experimental’, while forms that deliberately go beyond that, which challenge our understanding of the letters, are ‘speculative' »comments reported by Creators.
The graphic designer therefore explains in his own way that if we are able to decipher a writing, it is not speculative. On his official website, the latter explores the letters in a very broad way, that is to say that his creations can range from an alphabet similar to Latin (and therefore readable) to geometric shapes and other cryptograms quite mind-blowing.
“I try to push my limits, my expectations and my perceptions of what letters can be, and I see what happens”says Bary Spencer.
His modus operandi is as follows: draw letters by hand in varying combinations, then apply them to a grid. Finally, these grids are transposed on the Illustrator software in order to be animated by means of vectors. The interested party had launched a challenge in 2015, that of creating a different grid every day for one hundred days!
Barry Spencer also dreams of seeing his creations end up in a video game or a science fiction film, but for now, he likes to issue challenges like the one concerning his speculative font called « Clara » which he encrypted before to publish clues, but the fact is that no one has been able to decipher it yet!
‘The idea that what we understand today will not be understood by future generations is fun to imagine, so why not play now with what might influence this evolution?’, laughs the artist.
Sources: Typograh.her – Creators