The first set of symbols I made I'll call Version 1:
I don't know at what point I decided to make variations on the symbols, but the first thing I did was take the lines in Version 1 and make them curvy. This is Version 2:
For Version 3, I didn't just make them curvy, but made them complete (or nearly complete) circles:
Then I did the opposite, changing the diagonal lines to horizontal and vertical lines, for Version 4:
--------------------But what to do with these things?
The idea came to me somehow to arrange the symbols in a 3 by 4 grid, which would give me 12 spaces. And to figure out which symbols would go in those spaces, I simply chose a 12-letter word. The idea then came to me to let the definition of the word determine the variations and colors I would use in each design.
I went through the American Heritage Dictionary and found 191 12-letter words. Then I obsessively sketched designs in a graph paper pad, redrew a whole bunch of them in Adobe Illustrator on the computer, and then chose and colored the best ones, until I ended up with 48 final designs.
In future posts I'll talk about how I came up with each of these designs.
1 comments:
These are quite interesting, especially the way you have assigned them to the alphabet. With a little work this could be migrated from "artistic" to "Cryptographic" Imagine a few paragraphs of text converted into a page, then the cells could be overlayed over a photo and colorized. You'd end up with an interesting "stained glass" picture that was actually a hidden message.
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