All posts in: Typography

Speaking about VR Interfaces at FITC

I’ll brought my FutureType talk (Using the History of Typography to Inform the Future of UI) to the FITC Conference 2017 in Toronto. With the rising popularity of immersive media, design thinkers need to rethink UI standards around a new modality. As communication becomes more gestural, conversational, and less typographic, we will need to ensure it does not become abstract. In a world threatened by fake news, ensuring a future of clear, nuanced, and truthful communication will be incredibly important. This talk unpacks a condensed history of typography and justifies why said history can be used as a jumping off point for designing the future of user interfaces. We will discuss how to reconsider typographic history—and the nuances of phonetic letterforms—when inventing new user interfaces for a future of modular, invisible, and alternate reality devices.  

Audio Software Mirror Redux

The audio software mirror has evolved yet again, becoming a … The Conversation Cloud Generator is a wearable device that generates on-screen word clouds by listening to conversation and surveying syntax and volume. The interface is concealed within wrappings of wireform mesh (a thinner, more pliable version of the material that covers standard microphones) and sewn to a waist belt. The innocuous wearable contains two microphones and an Arduino. On microphone takes volume readings via the Arduino while the second sends four second audio clips (wav files) directly to the computer. Via Processing, the audio data is sent to Google Speech and the returned result is saved as text to a data file, accompanied by its corresponding volume readings (by four second delay). As the user’s leisure, the word cloud is generated via mouse click. Word size is determined by merging the volume values with the frequency of word use […]