Gibberish

Category

Editorial

Roles

Type Design, Lettering, Layout, & Printing

Programs

Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, & Glyphs App

How does nonsensical absurdity reveal the similarities between AI image generation and human spiritual practices?

While common discourse speculates AI image generation’s potential to replace artists and designers, this project highlights this technology’s potential to capture human absurdity instead of its ability to mimic human technical skills.

Investigation

To capture absurdity, my inspiration for this project was Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphianus. This illustrator and designer represented a nonsensical and imaginative world with illustrations and a fabricated writing system. I was inspired by how he recaptures the experience of flipping through an encyclopedia before knowing how to read. His use of typographic hierarchy and structure still allowed people to read the context without deciphering the text.

To conceptually drive my project, I researched glossolalia, also known as speaking tongues. This religious practice is where a speaker takes the sounds they have learned to vocalize and reassemble them into spoken gibberish. This practice felt like a parallel to how AI is trained to take images, products of cultural upbringing, and its ability to produce visual gibberish.

Process

I started by experimenting with AI image generation, seeing how prompts could lead to something that felt like gibberish. I found my audience interested in the prompts throughout critiques, so I included them as captions.

Sometimes text is unexpectedly warped into a confusing ensemble of forms

Splicing like this can happen very briefly, leaving little time to be captured

Fortunately, Denver is also surrounded with tags and graffiti that embrace cryptic beauty

To capture the nonsensical, the rest of the written text was developed using inspirations of moments where letters lose their shape. These include examples of text accidentally spliced or warped, abstract graffiti, and even AI image generation’s typographic gibberish. These examples inspired me to abstract Latin letterforms and include them in a magazine context. The magazines were appropriately named Gibberish, and I produced two issues inspired by two common goals of glossolalia: prophesize and transcend.

I lettered several titles and logos using a bizarre abstraction of Latin letterforms to avoid textual interpretation. I also developed two fonts that serve as extensions of Bodoni and Helvetica, using their same forms and proportions. Using the familiar elements of magazine publications, Gibberish encourages contextual interpretation instead.