 lovely way to wake up. Okay, so I thought I was switching gears a little bit more and was a bit of an anomaly in this group, actually, but it seems that the focus on process might actually relate to what I'm talking about. So I'm going out on a limb, so be kind. I'm going to talk about my stepping into a different medium with my background in typography and type design as a kind of linchpin that's holding them together. So I realised in the last year, I focused a lot in my research on the relationship between the process of typeface design and other disciplines. So I've looked at character design in typography or in typeface design and animation and things like that. And I realised this year that I was kind of sick of being on the computer screen and also just wanted to think about the notion of systematic creativity more broadly and just making systems and making things that relate to each other. So this was kind of started by just thinking about the word texture, which in typography has a very specific meaning, but the origins of the word texture as Paul Hunt articulated yesterday come from two different sources. So texture or textura, which we call the first or one of the earliest types from Gutenberg, comes from the word text, which is art skill or craft and also text area, which means to weave. So textura literally means woven. So I wanted to have a look at that idea of combining art skill and craft in a woven form in weaving. So I moved into the textile environment this year, having no background in weaving or anything really to do with fibres. To see what moving into a tactile or haptic environment might tell me about the invisible as systematic aspects of typography and typeface design. So this is a quote from Bruce Willen, one half of the authors of lettering and type, and he says that a well-designed page of text in a book or magazine is a beautiful pattern in its own right, one that is often so quiet and polite that our eye ignores the pattern itself diving straight into the text. So essentially the crystal goblet. And you guys all know this, but just to kind of recap, this is the default setting for Adobe Jensen and Niti Grotesque, two quite different typefaces with different models. But even if we just look at the horizontal alignments of these two typefaces set at their default setting, we can see very quickly that there's a different rhythm in the texture. And then if we look at the impacts of contrast and the proportion models for these two typefaces, we quickly see that they have different colors, typographic colors, the amount of words on a line changes. So their texture is defined by the typeface designer. And then when we give that to a typographer, they change that texture again, depending on the context that they're using that typeface in. And these are two scans from the wonderful inside paragraphs by Cyrus Highsmith, articulating the pattern that is formed by the glyph width, and then also in a kind of modular context, and then also the impact of changing the spacing on the speed and overall atmosphere of the texture. So Willen continues and is essentially saying that the typographers think about texture in a similar way to the way that textile designers think about texture, although we might not necessarily assume that. They change the texture by changing scale and using different kinds of contrast models in a similar way to the way that textile designers work with material, form, and color. So these are maybe what you might think of. That quote was taken from a website called Mataram, which is a textile manufacturer in an article called Textiles and Typography. And these are some of the examples that they use. So the top one there is from post typography, and it's the most recent from 2011. The middle is an Alexander Girard fabric using an alphabet as the texture. And the bottom one is from 1956, Gunnar Andersen. And these are all really good ways of showing that typography is pattern. But I really wasn't interested in that, and that's no disrespect, they're beautiful, but I wasn't interested so much in the surface level of texture, but more what it is for something to have a textural structure. And so I decided to dive right in and take a weaving class. And I took a class called Pictorial Weaving, which that term is a term coined by the weaver Annie Albers, who was a student at the Bauhaus and then later a teacher at Black Mountain College. And if you're not familiar with her work, which is maybe like she's one of the writers that is the most famous in weaving, you might know her husband's work, Joseph Albers, who worked on the interaction of color. And Pictorial Weaving I will come back to, but essentially it means that the weaver can, the weaver controlled shapes on the loom. So you can program a loom, but you can also work on a loom and create new shapes where you're spontaneously changing and deciding on what the shapes will be. So I learned how to use one of these cool contraptions. This is a floor loom. And the basic structure of Annie Weaving is that you have warp threads that run in a vertical direction and weft threads that are woven by the weaver through the layers of thread that move up and down, according to the pedals and the movement of the pedals on the floor. So I learned from this wonderful weaver and human, Janice Lessman Moss on the left hand side sitting in front of her weaving. And I moved my way or the class moved its way through different kinds of techniques of weaving on a loom in order to make pictures and symbols. So these are just some samples there and like looked at how integrating different kinds of materials changes the weave structure looked at how to make shapes, how to combine colors, things like that. And in that process, I learned about the relationship between textiles, I got to kind of dig a little deeper and reflect on what I was doing. And I learned that language and textile formation share a lot of attributes that kind of pliability or capacity to form structure relations between the components is in both of these fields. And so if you think about the idea that you use repeating component parts in a typeface, the same thing is true of weaving where you might use the same yarn or color again and again in the structure to create a rhythm. So both of the fields are concerned with rhythm. They both operate in a rhythmic fashion. So in order to read them and make them we work in a rhythmic way. They're both structural. And they both convey meaning. And that was the part that really interested me. And all of this was underscored by reading the work, the writings of Annie Albers, which were prolific and pretty much a game changer for the practice of weaving in the 20th century. So Albers kind of ended up in weaving because in the Bauhaus, although it was very idealistic, women were still kind of confined to feminine crafts. And so whether she liked it or not as a female, she was funneled into the weaving studio. But she came to appreciate the properties of textiles and specifically the laws of the production of a textile as a framework that was stimulating rather than restrictive, which I think as typographers we can relate to in terms of the modular grid and as typeface designers we can relate to in terms of the conventional structure of the alphabet and the limits to which you can push a shape before it becomes unreadable. So that was interesting and it kind of fell in love. So this is Annie Albers at her loon. And one of the central aspects of her writing focuses on the definition of medium, the word medium. And so possibly because she came from a German speaking background and moved into English, she really articulated the two different aspects of the word medium as she saw them, which influenced the way I thought about progressing into a larger scale weaving. So she defined weaving or defined medium as something that is grounded in material and a conversation with the actual substance and material that you're working with, where you are listening to it as much as you are trying to govern it. And also a vehicle for communication. So she was heavily influenced by Peruvian weaving and I'll show you some of that in a second. But what she really was talking about was the idea that by virtue of having been made at a specific point in time, with specific atmospheric conditions and spontaneous decisions, it was an artifact of that time and communicated whether it wanted to or not. And this is a quote from her book on weaving and this was really where it all kind of like jumped off for me and I recognize that there's a typo in this. But I left it there because that's kind of the nature of weaving to in order to fix a mistake, you have to pull it all out. So I was I noticed that after I submitted the PDF and I was like, well, it's kind of accurate. So she said that by taking up textile fundamentals and methods, she hoped to include in her audience not only weavers, but also those whose work in other fields encompasses textile problems. And so I read this and I thought, okay, I'm on to a winner because I think that typography encompasses textile problems. So if you think about medium as a conversation and or if you think about the word medium as something that is both grounded in material and a vehicle for communication, then it kind of boils down to the idea of translation because in order to have a conversation with somebody or a material, you have to in some way empathize and put yourself in the other shoes. So you have to understand the material in order to deal with it, which is kind of the basis of communication. So these are some weavings that were featured in her book as influences. And you can see here that in Peruvian weaving, the style typically uses geometric forms, profile figures. These are all symbolic and they can be read in a way that is meaningful to the culture. And in the Peruvian culture, weaving has a kind of elevated status as both something that is functional, but also communicative. God, I got to speed up. The other part of her definition of medium that I found interesting was just this inherent focus on the suspended nature of form in a structure. So if you think about our typographic text block, the invisible part is what I really find interesting, the thing that holds it together, which was much more clear in letterpress than it would be in typesetting today in a digital context. And then the other part of it is the idea of recording. These are two of her weavings. I'm going to speed up a little bit so I want to show you the weaving. But you can see here this one on the left is ancient writing and the other one is called dotted. And both of them are looking at just the idea of reading text-like shapes and forms. And her textiles are still in production. The only reason I'm really showing you this is that you can see that the grid is a really important part of planning a weaving. And so all of this led me to think about what could I do as a typographer to play with weaving and learn something. So essentially that kind of led me to make some letter forms, because it's the only way I know how to interact with things. So I decided I would make some letters and also bring in some of the invisible aspects of typography and typesetting. So things like the edge of the bounding boxes of typographic text blocks and the Bezier curve handles and things like that. And see what happened if I pulled them into a tactile environment, would it make us more aware of them and allow one medium to articulate the other? So as I said, she was not interested in deciphering or copying written languages, but marks and signs. So that's really what I wanted to do too. So she wrote all of the writings that she focused on weaving in on a typewriter. And so the kind of aesthetic context of her work is typewriting and she actually taped the sheets together in a way that sort of reflects the nature of a loom and a weaving. And she also explored just typographic texture using the typewriter as a tool to make textures. So I wanted to pull that into the shapes I was going to make. And then I was also influenced by any kind of typography that really focused or highlighted the invisible structure. So we become aware of what is holding it in place. And also typography that just makes the type itself the textural element. So this is some more of that just rhythm, background. So I wanted to pull in some of the context too of the Bauhaus. So although Renner's future was not designed at the Bauhaus, it sort of embodies a lot of the principles. So I tried to fuse the two of them together and make something to play with. So this is all the letters I made. It's just a very, very basic character set to put into the weaving. And then I took some of the test elements from that and printed them on Mylar so that I could slice them up and weave them into the weaving to reflect a typewriter tape. So these are some of the process for the weaving. And you can see that I'm bringing in more and more of the invisible elements like the markup language. If you're going to sketch a layout in a thumbnail, things like the marquee tool down here. So the cyan colour was a deliberate choice because that's what we're using in the digital world to describe things that won't print. I was bringing in the negative spaces of letterforms, the aperture shapes, little missing tofu or you could also look at it as the side bearing indicators and a glyph. So essentially it boiled down to being a really big conversation that I was having with Annie Alba's writings and the material of yarn that I was using and the type design process. So this is how you set up a grid on a loom. This is all the individual threads that go into the warp and they're threaded by hand through these heddles. And then as you can see on the right-hand side these shafts lift up different parts of that structure at a time and you can pass the weft through it. And then before they get there they go through this reed. So this is kind of your dots per inch. And then this is what it looked like when I was weaving. So you can see I had Illustrator open over beside me here and I had a little guide here and I also used natural linen and dyed or bleach linen so that I could have a kind of structure. And I picked linen because it's when you it's quite a coarse material so it creates a very open weave so you can see through it. So it allowed me to kind of harness the tactile quality of weaving to show and hide things. And this is as much as you see it at any one time in a weaving so you're kind of building without seeing the end. So that really forces that spontaneity that Albers was talking about. And because I was taking something into the tactile environment and taking the invisible things into a tactile environment I wanted to use textural yarns so very large chunky kind of rust color there. The cream one has a very undulating amount of fluffiness to it. And then I explained why I used linen already. So here you can see the mylar embedded. You can see a knot the texture up close. But I also wanted to bring in that temporal quality of weaving. So every time I stopped working I would just make a mark. And you can see that the structure just allows me to say if you count them it's ten o'clock when I stopped. It was five o'clock when I stopped. And those also are obviously trying to mimic the behavior of a stroke. So they kind of was taking my cues from nib tests for calligraphy there. And then the interesting thing about this process for me was that when you turn over the weaving you can actually see something you can't see when you make letter forms in a digital environment. Which is that you can see the movement of the weaver's hand through the texture itself. So there's a legacy of the action of making that we don't have anymore. And I'm going to talk about this project which is an ongoing research project at 8typi and focus a little bit more on the value of craft and what digital craft is. But I find this really interesting. And the other part of it was that when you hold the weaving up to the light you can see through it. So you can really see the idea of suspension of form. That's not quite as apparent when you look at something on a printed page. So this is the final weaving which looks a lot better in person. And you can play with it and you can touch it and it has more of the effect that I want. But really this is kind of a work in progress. And as I said this is my first attempt at weaving. So it's not supposed to be a finished product. And my next steps then are to look at all the things that I've learned. That was really critical making is when you make something to find something out. So you're not making it for the end product but you're making it to learn. And so that was really a valuable part of this was to make the letter forms and realize that they were throw away. I don't want to make this high face that I thought I wanted to make. And I'm going to revise all the shapes and play with some of the more conceptual things that I learned about a woven structure where maybe things come from behind or you emphasize the positive and negative in a different way. So I'm going to have a look at layered font technology to make a tight face that might behave like a weaving but also move into the digital loom the Jacquard loom and look at how it might translate some of the digital aspects of a font into a material form and see what that might tell me also. And then lastly the digital and material craft divide. What is it to make something that has a connection with the audience in a digital context that still reflects all of the hours that are put into it and all the spontaneous decisions that maybe bond us together as a society that deals with things that are made as opposed to mass produced. So it's really just in process at the moment and that's all I have to say on it but I'd love to hear anybody's feedback or if anybody has any examples of weaving and typography I'd love to hear about them. So thank you.