TYPE + CODE Series

Exhibition Dates: March 22-26, 2021

This year’s design judge for the 2021 Student Annual is Profressor Yeohyun Ahn. Ahn is a Madison-based designer, educator, and researcher, integrating creative coding, digital fabrication, and physical interaction into spatial typography and graphic design. Her interdisciplinary typography project, TYPE + CODE Series, has been featured through Washington Post, PRINT, New York Times Magazine, Letter Arts Review, Creator’s Project, Designboom.com , etc

It is a collection of computational typographic experiments and researches by the artist since 2005. It aligns with alternative typeface and typography methods, solutions, and education in America. It began as her MFA thesis, TYPE+CODE, at Maryland Institute College of Art, in 2007. It has extended to the continuing typography research series from TYPE + CODE to TYPE Portrait. TYPE + CODE explored the aesthetic of code-driven typography by using letter form. The computational visual outputs were original, exploratory, inventive, and novel. TYPE + CODE II used letterform, words, phrases, and sentences to explore expressive typographic forms and solutions using mathematic expressions, computer algorithms, and libraries. It conveyed diversified visual messages inspired by nature, addressing environmental issues such as green design, healing through arts, exploring philosophical and religious interpretation regarding life, death, and love. TYPE+CODE III extended the aesthetic of code-driven typography from cyberspace to physical space by using digital fabrication. Floral Typography is a design trend to combine calligraphy, typography, and lettering with floral visual elements. Floral Typography + CODE reinterpreted floral typography to generative floral typography. The recent version, Typographic Selfie + CODE, is a series of self-portrait photographs in response to her sense of invisibility as a woman of color to portrait an academic stranger in professional areas of American society. Based on the type choices? it can deliver generative selfies with different emotions and moods. The typographic selfie + CODE uses diverse typefaces to convey feelings and thoughts in the generative selfie. It shows possibilities to use each typeface's personality to be expressive and visually appealing in the generative selfies. The series of researches have embedded into graphic design education as the courses, Typography and Code, in Visual Communication Design, at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, from 2012 to 2014, Creative Coding, from 2014 to 2018, at Valparaiso University, and Motion Typography, Advanced Typography, and Creative Coding for Graphic Design, in the Graphic Design program, at the University of Wisconsin Madison since 2018.

Project website
Yeohyun Ahn's website