Talk with Joe. Inspiration!

So Thursday Joe from Qubik was in the studio doing his rounds, as he usually does to see how everybody is getting on and helps as best he can. He stopped by my table to see what was going on and we were talking about my beautiful characters brief.

In terms of content, although previously considered I have been working towards the idea of a conventional alphabet and numeric values (both caps and lower) as t-shirt designs where as Joe suggested Glyphs (and at this point seems so obvious to me) When I have thought about glyphs as a letterform, as do a lot of people just think of the generically used glyphs or punctation, with the occasional ampersand or interesting scores. With the majority of typefaces, there are a wide variety of different letterforms and glyphs made up in a typeface to allow for other languages or abbreviation hidden in the font file and only accessed through particular shortcuts and codes or selecting from a menu. In indesign (and infact alot of pieces of software) you can access them and discover some really interesting shapes and patterns. Oh Joe, you genius.

Aswell as this brilliant discovery of glyphs, is a site Joe referred me to called decode-unicode. Best explained from this quote from their concept -

'To meet the requirements of global communication, every modern operating system facilitates the access to a great variety of scripts: Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Chinese, Braille, to name just a few. There's also a huge number of special characters such as dingbats, copyright characters, currency symbols, mathematical characters and punctuation.

Just the pre-installed system fonts on a PC confront the user with thousands of unfamiliar characters. Many users stand helpless in the face of such vast numbers of characters, they simply lack the knowledge about the various meanings and typographically correct use of all those "new" characters.

decodeunicode is an independent platform for digital type culture, conceived and developed under the lead of professor Johannes Bergerhausen in cooperation with the designer Siri Poarangan at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz. The project is supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and has the objectives of creating a basis for fundamental typographic research and facilitating a textual approach to the characters of the world for all computer users. That way, expert knowledge can be systematically collected and made accessible to the general public. '

The incredible detail the catalogue goes into is amazing, with a whole variety of shapes and weights of line, in a variety of different categories I haven't even heard of.

A sample page. 

How can I incorporate glyphs? Do I make a random selection from a random amount of typefaces? do I sample from the chosen typefaces I have? Do I select a category according to decode-unicode? I feel with this much potential, they need to be included in some way.

www.decodeunicode.org/en/