Maurice Meilleur A key feature of constructed scripts—type and lettering designs that diagram themselves—is that one can read off their design spaces and procedures of creation from their appearances. But there are frequently many different ways to ‘play the game’ of these scripts—any given designer’s choices are never definitive, and no algorithms for these scripts are ever exhaustive. There are always alternatives, always possibilities for redefining or tweaking a design’s parameters to think about what can be letters and what letters can be.
After a brief discussion of Douglas Hofstadter’s ‘Letter Spirit’ project, a look at a few examples, and a warmup exercise to help us get familiar with these ideas, we’ll look at, reverse-engineer, and think about how we might re-imagine the rules of these scripts by designers like Josef Albers, Wim Crouwel, Jurriaan Schrofer, Norm, Hamish Muir and Paul McNeil, Radim Peško, Vanessa Zúñiga Tinizaray, and others. Participants will share ideas and feedback, and generate and display printed specimens of their results. The goal of this workshop is to help designers and design educators interested in constructed scripts—or in algorithmic formal system designs generally—understand and appreciate, and hopefully inspire them to incorporate in their own work and studio projects, the elements of puzzle-solving and play in these scripts.