For designers, the rigidity of an alphabet presents a never-ending artistic challenge: How do you do something new and still preserve the letters' essential forms?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
To me, letters have always been a robust medium of sublimation. I don't remember what I was like before I learned my ABC's, but for as long as I can remember I have made them with my fingers and felt them in my bones.
Artistic tricks divert from the effect that an artist endeavors to produce, and even excellent elements such as bullets, arrows, brackets, ornate initials, are at best superficial ornamentation unless logically employed.
I'm a very careful, slow writer, and I think a lot of that comes from the care required to be a hand-printer, where if something isn't spaced out enough, you take little slivers of brass or copper and put them between each letter.
Every day, I think of designs, but I don't write them down, and I forget. If only I had an office.
To create characters, one must build background. And one of the tools we use is improvisation.
You know it's my job to visualize, what is literal or audible, so I designed all the characters, and I designed what they do and how they should do it and so on.
When I write now I do not invent situation, characters, or actions, but rather structures and discursive forms, textual groupings which are combined according to secret affinities among themselves, as in architecture or the plastic arts.
Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.
Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical.
I made three or four different fonts during 'Short Term 12' -' it was how I'd calm my mind between scenes. I have graph paper and gel pens, and I would do the alphabet: just do 'a' over and over again until I got it perfect and then go to 'b' and then 'c'.