Creative Typography

Blaydon Races...

Here is the song and lyrics for the Blaydon races, I am inclined to use either the Blaydon races or the Lampton worm as the sing song nature both encasulate the accent and dialect as well as being, happy. If I can create typography which will visulise either of these songs I feel that the accent could be accuratley portrayed.

Possible songs for kinetic typorgraphy experiments

I want to create the same affect as the Blink 182 video, but with a geordie accent, one possiblilty for this is to use a geordie folk song, other options are to create kinetic typography for a conversation, or some sort of instructional annimetion.

There are 2 poosiblities which I am considering for the 'songs', the Lampton Worm and The Bladon races...here are the songs, if i was to do this I would source my own voices to create the background music, but this is the jist...

Kinetic typography

For one of my final outcomes I am aiming to create a piece of kinetic typography which will capture the essence of the accent and dialect in the North East. Here are two excellent examples of kinetic typography which have inspired me...

Jamie Hukkisson

This use of typography highlights that type does not have to be on a flat surface, it can create things, objects, places and landscapes. This type of work could be used to create the landscapes of the northeast.

Danny Dorling

Danny Dorling was educated at The University of Newcastle upon Tyne in Geography, Mathematics and Statistics leading to a PhD in the Visualization of Spatial Social Structure (1991). He continued studying in Social Science at Newcastle as a Joseph Rowntree Foundation and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow before moving to the University of Bristol to teach Geography there, next being appointed to a Chair of Quantitative Human Geography at the University of Leeds.

The type of maps which Danny Dorling produces are both informative and athetically pleasing. The have design aspects to them with the shapes and colour used, though his maps are primarily for imformative reasons.

Visual Onomatopeia

These images are often found in cartoons, they go some way to showing how a word or sound would look like, the words are often onomatopeia anyway, such as boom, which makes a visual representation easier. This is the type of thing I want to create with the typography I use in my final project, to see how the word sounds. - some illustration may also be involved in this.- The key question here is which words would be chosen and what would they look like?

Creating Visulizations

http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/

This website shows how data can be interpreted in different ways and enables you to create these different and varied visulizations

"Who's a Geordie?"- Poet Christopher Robin

This shows the Newcastle accent better than the previous clip, which more shows the Northern sense of humour and how somebody with a North Eastern accent views themselves. The previous clip shows clearly that these two boys are aware of thier accent,and proud of it, a feeling which is shared between many across the North East.

This clip however better demonstrates the vocab and tone used, and the sing song nature of the accent is highlighted through the poem.

"Lean to speak geordie"

New ways of giving old information

These maps present information that most people are familiar with, this is what I will be attempting to do with North East accents, (the people of that area will already be familiar with the accents surrounding them, however I wish to re present this information to them). These maps also come in print form,a final outcome which my designs must adhere to.

The Lord of the rings map is particually interesting to me as it shows a new simplified way to give the complex information of a novel in a simple graph illustration. Looking at my problem more mathmatically, perhaps in a graph type form may be one way to approach this project.

More weird maps can be found at:http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

Visual representation?

Visual information: do actual visuals have to be included of the North East or would typography be enough to convey emotions and sounds?

Typographic Maps

Taking that I am combining both geographic regions and words, pharases and sounds that errupt there a typographic map may be one solution to solve the problem of visually representing the perceptual accents in the North East, each accent or sound or group could have a typeface, or colour, with them becoming joined through font groups? This may be a complex way to look at the problem, but I am going to look further into this solution...

Interesting typography

Text Arc

TextArc is a tool designed to help people discover patterns and concepts in any text by leveraging a powerful, underused resource: human visual processing. It compliments approaches such as Statistical Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics by providing an verview, letting intuition help extract meaning from an unread text. It is a visual representation of ideas can concepts found in books or a body of text by anaylsing how many times a word is used and then displaying it accordingly. For more information you can visit: www.textarc.org

Maps that don't look like maps

My aim by the end of this project is to create a perceptual map of accents in the North East of England. However I don’t want to simply pin different accents to a geographical map of the North East. As a design student I want to create an interesting visual which also has all the information needed. Maps are beginning to change, along with the concept of them, now perhaps it is more apt to call them a guide. My aim, though questionable how possible an achievement this will be for me is to create a new system, a new way of looking at things, places, sounds. Why I labelled it a perceptual and not a geographical ‘map’.

Above are some examples of these types of maps created by other people.

1. Barrett Lyon’s map of the Internet 2003, The Opte Project
This map, maps what is beyond the visual and instead presents complex information in a way that is accessible and understandable.

2. Alice In Wonderland as analysed by Bradford Paley’s TextArc System
This is perhaps the most relevant to my project as this is a visual map of words; it uses words and typography to covey the traditional story in a whole new way.

3.Walrus graph visualization tool 2001–02. Java and Java3D software. Image by Young Hyun and Bradley Huffaker

Max Hornak

Found this really interesting blog by Max Hornak, who has found and created alot of amazing peices of typography, WWW.CREATIVE -TYPOGRAPHY.COM.

Children's books

He has terrible tusks
And terrible claws
And terrible teeth in his terrible jaws…

Another thing to consider when creating a map focused around accents is the language used. I really like the language and repetition used in children’s books such as the Gruffalo, which one could imagine would be illuminating in a North Eastern accent. Though this sing song nature may not be suitable for such a complex subject, and my target audience are people who could draw some comprehension from the original journal by Dr Pearce, may be offended by such a dumbing down of the subject. It would however be nice to create a friendly and accessible tone which can be found in books such as the Gruffalo. I am also aiming not to have too much complex explanation crowding the map, so the simpler the better as far as explanation of the subject is concerned. My aim is that people looking at the map will already have a vague understanding of the context.

Rob Ryan

These are images from a book by illustrator Rob Ryan, (rob-ryan@blogspot.com), the illustrations and images centre mainly around Ryan’s work at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Though separately each of thee design’s work, I find that they work exceptually in the context of the park, with the nature and real life surrounding them. I love the way that the typography has a hand rendered effect, a personal touch to each letter and word. This may be one way to look at my map, exploring each word with a personal touch. Colloquiums is a personal thing any way, as each region pronounces each word with a slightly different twang, this could perhaps be represented in the rendering of each word.

Outline

I am a Third Year studying Grpahic Design, for my independent project I am aiming to create a visual perceptual map of the accents found in the North East of England using some of the reseach conducted by Dr. Michael Pearce, a lecturer of English Language at Sunderland Univeristy. This blog is one way which I will record my visual inspirations before creating my percetual map.