Faculty of Arts & Science

Digital Futures

Christina Chen

Crystal type: Physiomorphic font design through generative tooling

My project explores the role of design tools to creative outcomes through applications of data science in font design, and challenges the way we communicate through digital typefaces.It begins with an organic phenomenon and develops through a series of experimentations with man-made tools. I was inspired by the formation of salt crystals to grow my own using physical letters. These letters were then brought into the digital realm, where I played with creating my own font, using a machine learning model to produce characters given reference input glyphs, and displaying the font on a website using OpenAI’s speech to text Whisper API.