Sentimentype is a typeface that has feeling directly imbedded into the font. In the age of digital communication, it is difficult to explicitly express and understand the intended emotion or tone of a message. As a result, I created a font that has feeling embedded directly into it through color and demonstrated its use by creating a chatting app prototype that allows users to experience it.
Users are able to select the emotion they are feeling or the tone they are trying to portray and in turn the font will change to reflect that emotion. With a simple change in color both the sender and receiver of a message will be able to share an understanding of what is trying to be said beyond the content of the words themselves.
When I first began to develop my typeface, I thought about how I wanted to express emotion and what would be the easiest way for users to understand the feeling behind each varient of the font. I considered using shape, line, movement, or color. Ultimately, I chose to use color to express emotion because there is already a strong association between certain colors and emotions. For example, yellow represents happiness and blue signifies saddness. I decided not to use motion or line because I wanted the focus of this project to be the text itself and how I could create a subtle and elegant solution to this problem without having to completely teach the user how to associate symbols to emotion from scratch.
I went through a quite a few prototypes of my font in order to determine how I wanted to the color. I wanted the color to be clearly visible but not too overpowering. As a result I decided to create a gradient with lines so that each letter was legible and it's color was clearly visible.
This project also gave me the opportunity to learn a new program and learn more about typography design in general. I used a combination of a program called Glyphs, which is made specifically for typography design and Adobe Illustrator to implement color into my font.
In the end I created 111 glyphs in 10 different color variations. The typeface is completely functional in programs that support color fonts like Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. Instead of selecting different weights of the font, users select an emotion like anger, saddness, or love. I also created a prototype that would demonstrate what it would be like for users to use my typeface in the context of a chatting app. Users would first select the emotion they want to express and then type out a message they would like to send. Users' conversations would then be color coded to reflect different emotions. As users use the app more and more they will get a better understanding of what each color represents.