My class is having an experimental type show on April 8th which is going to be incredible. Here's the blurb and all of the characters I made for the show.
SYNESTHESIA:
My x-type is based off my observations of my wife’s recent discovery of her synesthesia. For my typeface I used her descriptions of each letter form and illustrated them the way I perceive them. Here’s a brief description of the condition.
Synesthesia—From the words syn, “together,” aisthesis, “sensation”—is a neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes. In my wife’s case she has two different forms of synesthesia.
In one of the most common forms of synesthesia, grapheme, color synesthesia, individual letters of the alphabet and numbers (collectively referred to as graphemes), are “shaded” or “tinged” with a color. While different individuals usually do not report the same colors for all letters and numbers, studies with large numbers of synesthetes find some commonalities across letters (e.g., A is likely to be red).
Ordinal-linguistic personification (or personification for short) is a form of synesthesia in which ordered sequences, such as ordinal numbers, days, months and letters are associated with personalities and genders.
There you have it! A very interesting yet strange condition. It was a lot of fun drawing these descriptions and I hope you enjoy viewing these little characters as much as enjoyed making them. I especially enjoyed the unknowns. Which one are you?!?
