 Hello, everyone. Like the last two speakers, I'm also presenting work from my thesis. The difference is I'm currently in the process of finishing my thesis. And so what you're seeing is actually work that's in progress rather than something that's finished. But what I want to talk about today is modularity, permutation, and open form. These are three ideas that I'll define here in a few minutes. But first, I want to start with the premise of my thesis. So what I'm looking at is visual identity design and type in the service of visual identity. And so there is a movement, I guess, of foot in visual identity design to think of it more as a flexible system rather than sort of the late modernist idea of a repeatable thing that is static and always appears the same in every instance. So in 2008, one of my heroes in design, Hugh Deverly, wrote an article called Design in the Age of Biology. And he talked about, at sort of a 30,000 foot view of design, that design is changing as a discipline from something that is dealing with more technology-based ideas like information flow and networks of actors rather than more traditional ideas of form-making. And so part of that is this comparison of what he calls a mechanical object ethos versus an organic systems ethos, which is what he claims that we're moving toward. And so some of the things that I found interesting here were the idea of something that's self-organized or grown rather than something that's made. Designer as author, or designer as facilitator versus designer as author. And then the idea of client as a steward of the thing that is designed rather than an owner of that thing. And finally, a stocking condition that is good enough for now and that can continue to adapt and evolve rather than something that is almost perfect and complete. These are things that challenge me because I feel like I was educated in the more mechanical object ethos. And so trying to break out of that and really try to understand what these other ideas mean. So thinking more specifically about visual identity design, there's this notion that designers are going to be creating visual identities that have perpetually updatable databases and generative archives rather than perhaps a minimum kit of parts that is turned over to the client. And so there are these three ideas that I've come across, modularity, permutation, open form. I see them as sitting on a continuum from something that's less complex to something that's more complex. And so the three prototypes that I'm going to show you today that I've been working on run the gamut from modularity to open form. Speaking specifically of modularity, this is the idea that parameters are fixed. There's a low bit of complexity and the designer is exerting the most control at this point. And so there's this idea that was first, the term was first coined I think by an architect, Peter Pierce in the 1970s, minimum inventory maximum diversity. So this is the idea that you're starting with a small number of things and you're creating a large number of things from that. And so I think an example that we could relate to is type cooker. This is breaking a typeface down into various parameters and then fixing those parameters. So you hit refresh, you get a new set of parameters, but the idea is that you're designing a typeface based on those parameters. Permutation deals with constants and variables. So you're still talking about parameters, but now the parameters are less fixed. They're allowed to fluctuate a little bit. This is moderately complex and the designer is releasing some of his over control over the final outcome rather than trying to control that. So another tool that we might be more familiar with, prototypo is something where you're not necessarily controlling all of the variables. You're allowing interpolation and the code that the application has control some of those things. You're simply sliding a slider and allowing it to do what it does. And then finally, the idea of open form deals with data flows. This is highly complex and you have very little control. So rather than you controlling those parameters, they're still fluctuating, they're in flux, but you're not necessarily the one inputting the data that controls what those variables do. So then in order to create something, I needed content. And so what I did was I sort of looked for something that was of interest to me. And since I was a child, I've been interested in lunar astronomy, astronomy in general. And so I found this fairly obscure process that was named after me, Tom of Athens. He realized that 235 lunar cycles is about the same as 19 solar years. And so by adding a few days of the year and some leap months every so often, you can sort of synchronize the lunar and solar calendars so that you don't sort of have this slipping of the seasons through the year if you're simply staying with the lunar calendar. And so this was fairly influential for a while until the Julian calendar was introduced. And so I used this metonic cycle as sort of the content of the three prototypes that I created. And so what I'm doing is I'm creating three visual identities for three hypothetical companies or entities and using various aspects of the metonic cycle as the content for each one of those. So the first one I came up with in lunar geology, zircon is one of the most common elements on the moon. And so I sort of combined that with this idea of these things called zomes. I'm not sure if you guys have ever seen these, but they're these structures sort of like geodesic domes that are built out of a single shape that just sort of fluctuates. It's a diamond that either gets wider or narrower as you get toward the top or the bottom. And so it's sort of the tagline I came up with for this company was moon bases for planet Earth. So it's these sort of unusual dwellings that are structures that can be built. And so I wanted a visual identity and a typeface that represented this that was along the same lines. So I started working with these paper models of the element zirconium. And I started building these three dimensional forms out of them that took on these sort of interesting shapes. But then what I wanted to do is I wanted to take that and flatten it into two dimensions so that I could then generate a typeface from that. And so what I first came up with was this pattern that represented the way that these models would sort of interlock with one another. And then if you connect the center points of all of those shapes within that, you get a more complex pattern that looks like this. And so kind of similar to what Joe and Ryan presented earlier, this typeface was generated from the shapes found within this pattern. And so I isolated all of the various shapes and started to put those things together, rotate them in different ways. And I had no idea whether or not I could sort of discover type from these shapes. So I started piecing them together. And I started seeing these stems start to come together, serifs that were forming at the bottoms of these things. And so then ultimately came up with enough material to create this typeface based on the matrix that I showed a couple slides prior. So these are some sort of minor variations of that. And then sort of a final resolved letter mark based on the shapes found in that two dimensional matrix. So then the next prototype that I created was for a hypothetical hotel, Hotel Meton. And what I wanted to do with this was look at sort of the way that the Metonic cycle actually works and to be sort of influenced by the culture that Meton existed within. And so I started looking at images from Greek antiquity and objects as well. And also sort of patterns that were being used on various things. But I also was interested in the fact that even though visual identity design has been sort of preached as this thing that is static and repeatable, there were some modernists who were doing very interesting and flexible things. This is Alexander Gerard's identity for La Fonda del Sol. And it didn't have a single logo. It had an idea of a logo that you could sort of create these permutations of. So he had about five faces, about five different sort of sun rays. And then these various colors that you could recombine in new and interesting ways. And so sort of combining those two ideas with a Metonic cycle. There are these leap years in the Metonic cycle every so often that add an extra month to the calendar. And so thinking about that in terms of the way that that would look visually. You have this 19 year cycle where there are seven long years and 12 short years. And so that sort of rhythm was what guided me to create a tight-faces sort of flexible and can get wider and narrower. And so I worked in glyphs and I found this sort of simple couple lines of code that you could add to the tight-face that depending on where it was and what it was next to the letters would either be the normal width or they would stretch to indicate the sort of the longer years of the Metonic cycle. And so taking the words hotel, meton and applying that sort of rhythm of the 19 years, 12 of which are normal, seven of which are longer, you sort of get these different permutations of the logo. It's all from the same tight-face and so it sort of all looks like it belongs but there's a variation there that happens. And I'm sort of releasing some of the control I have over that. Whatever letters come next, they decide whether they're going to be wide or narrow based on the sort of algorithm that I've created. And so when you add that to this marker that I made for this fictitious hotel that also has some parameters that vary. The owl's eyes either open or close to varying degrees. So here you can see on the wings there's a pattern and those patterns are derived from the letters and the words hotel, meton. So there are these various elements that recombine at random for a total permutation, there's 288 possible permutations of this logo and I'll just keep moving. So this last example is the most complex. This deals with open form and the idea that there are external factors controlling the variables rather than a designer. And this is also the one that's least resolved at this point. I only have some examples to show but the fictitious organization here is this sort of ancestry or genetic sort of company like the DNA service that's offered by Ancestry.com or 23andMe. And this idea comes from the fact that a calypic cycle is for metonic cycles plus one day because Calypus decided that the metonic cycle would still sort of cause problems over long periods of time. So another day needed to be added every 76 years and 76 years happens to also be about the life expectancy of a human being. And so I started thinking about typography as a living thing, a thing that was born sort of young and immature and grew to something more mature over time. And so what I wanted to do was use the different parts of this cycle to govern parameters of the typeface. And so the lunar rhythm governs the weight of the letter forms, the solar rhythms which are longer govern the width of the letter forms. And then finally the position, which metonic cycle you're in of the four that exist within a calypic cycle determine the sort of ends of the letter forms. And so here you can see a simple example of a waxing and waning sort of thing like from a new moon to a full moon and back to a new moon. But if you'll notice as this goes from left to right the letter form is actually increasing in width slightly because it's also moving through the solar cycle at the same time. So that you get this sort of over a year span of time you get this letter form that goes from thin and narrow and sort of waxes and wanes but also gets longer as you get toward the summer solstice and then would get narrower again as you move back toward the winter solstice. And it's difficult to see because it happens over such a long period of times but the terminals at the bottoms of these letter forms would go from this sort of young looking rounded sans-serif typeface to something that's more serious looking as it matures over time. And so the terminals would gradually shift. And so over the course of the formatonic cycles you would get something that goes from like I said something that's a sans-serif with rounded terminals to a more serious looking sans-serif to something that sort of sprouts these slabs sort of at the midlife crisis point of the typeface. And then ultimately those serifs are connected to the strokes by a bracket as it grows more mature over time. And I believe that is all I have. Thank you.