I’m fascinated by transformation. The ability to break something, remake it, and find its new logic. For a child of divorce, the need for that skill was very real.
The feeling followed me. In my 20s I was obsessed with glitchy electronic music. I wanted to do what the musicians were doing—explore the liminal, reflect the world as I felt it.
But words don’t really glitch. Pull a word apart, you get letters. Remix the word, you get… other words. I puzzled it for years. Finally, I just put it on the shelf.
Then came 2024. Middle of dead-inside Boston winter.
Talking to a Custom GPT about one of those bands, it hit me—to get what I wanted, I had to break the one rule I’ve defended my whole career: readability.
Go smaller. Drill past the letterform. Muck around with its letter-ness. Break the shell to get at the thing I’m sure is inside.
This is an ongoing project.
Time Frame
2024–
Objective
Pure exploration, baby
Software
After Effects, ChatGPT, Claude, Dimension, Illustrator, Glyphs Mini, Leonardo, Photoshop
Skills
- 3D
- Art Direction
- Concepting
- Design
- Retouching
- Strategy
- Typography
It started with a bang
Actually, it started with a grid. I picked a letter from typeface I’m very familiar with: the f from Kazimir Italic, because I love its serifs and long descender.
Structured unstructuring
I started by slicing and dismantling the letter. Then I rearranged it. To keep its familiarity it had to feel both random and structured, so I moved every piece strictly on a grid.
Little explosions everywhere
I asked Claude and ChatGPT to write me a series of scripts for Illustrator that randomly resize and move objects. They were helpful… but only as a finishing touch.
Another approach
Letters are flexible and delicate. I was curious how far I could go, so I started mixing and matching, careful to maintain the shapes that make the font the font. Some look like ligatures. Some took long detours to look like letters you know.
Kazimir Italic
Familiar Italic
Early experiments
Vector shapes don’t always play well, and large blocks of text would be a nightmare to set manually, so I made a font. I taught myself to kern in Glyphs.
Then I started to imagine their world…