At the core of my practice is my self-made modular design tools. These tools allow me to construct images by combining small units into a larger whole — essentially, it's my way of drawing. While these units can take many forms, I'm particularly interested in modular type and ornament.
I develop these tools without adding any automated image generation; each drawing is meticulously constructed by hand, unit by unit. The limitations intrinsic to the modular process yield drawings that simultaneously embody the essence of handmade work and that of the machine age.
Developing and designing tools, fonts and modular systems is as much part of my practice as the artwork I produce with them. Although I initially made these tools for my own practice, I publish them online for everyone to use for free. My goal is to spread the joy of modular design.
I invite you to browse my portfolio where you'll find a showcase of my experiments in modular design. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions!
Heikki Lotvonen | hlotvonen@gmail.com | Helsinki, Finland
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Glyph Drawing Club
Glyph Drawing Club is a web-based editor for drawing with type ornament. It has a library of fonts, each containing shapes that can be combined seamlessly into larger designs.
I developed Glyph Drawing Club because I was frustrated at trying to make a border using type ornament in InDesign.
By designing my own tool, I was able to combine my interest with type ornament with features from old-school ASCII art editors, including a keyboard-centric workflow and a consistent grid structure. Turns out that this combination together with increased customization options makes it a very versatile tool for creating type design, illustrations, patterns or even visual poetry.
"Swan" by Sebastian Carter in Painting with Type, 2007
Timelapse above shows the process of using Glyph Drawing Club. The picture is modeled after Sebastian Carter's letterpress version which was constructed using geometric type ornaments dating from the 1920s. I've designed several type ornament fonts for Glyph Drawing Club — including "Tesserae", a set of type units that are similar to what Carter used.
While it's unclear how long it took Carter to design the "Swan," it likely required many hours of painstaking work. In contrast, I was able to make the digital recreation of it in just 12 minutes; not to diminish Carter's work, but rather to highlight how Glyph Drawing Club enables a rapid design process that simply isn't possible with traditional letterpress. My goal is to eventually use Glyph Drawing Club for type ornament compositions, and then print those designs using letterpress.
Type specimen of "Tesseare" which I designed to be used in Glyph Drawing Club
Working within constraints is a driving force for my practice. Constraints free up mental energy by eliminating possibilities, yet they also present a stimulating challenge: for example, how do I make a circle with squares? I'm always trying to push the boundaries of both the process and the tool at hand. Crafting an image this way feels similiar to solving a puzzle without knowing the end result; a process which often leads to delightful and curious outcomes.
See how each pattern is constructed by combining, reusing, rotating and mirroring individual type ornaments:
Experiments with a variety of digitized ornaments, including "celtic knots".
The following images are some experiments I've made using Glyph Drawing Club:
"Vista of Valencia" made by Andrés Ferrer Viñerta in the late 1800s, using 5031 individual pieces of type.And the digital recreation I made using Glyph Drawing Club.
I created the following logos and images by blending two modular fonts that I digitized from vintage type specimens and customized for Glyph Drawing Club. One of them is a set of Art Nouveau style combination borders, while the other is "Super Veloz", a collection of type modules designed by Joan Trochut in the early 1940s in Barcelona. Using these fonts dissolve the inherent square grid almost completely, while still retaining a typographic balance.
I made the following image using only 9 unique type ornaments, listed at the bottom of the image. The shapes are digitized versions of Bruce Rogers' type ornaments from ~1920's.
Designed with a digitized version of Bruce Rogers' ornaments.
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Moebius XBIN
MoebiusXBIN is a cross-platform program for creating unusual ASCII art. I built it upon the foundation of an open-source ASCII art editor, but modified it to break away from the traditional constraints of ASCII art by allowing users to work with custom fonts and colors.
MoebiusXBIN is similiar to Glyph Drawing Club in many ways, but it's based on 8-bit ASCII art, restricting colors to 16 and available shapes to 256. The following are some illustrations I've made with the program:
Editor view of MoebiusXBIN.
Drawings I made using MoebiusXBIN for the Ossian magazine
I also made Bannermode recently. It's a web-based editor for designing large and complex Minecraft banner compositions.
I'm currently working on updating Glyph Drawing Club, and developing two new tools: Unicode Drawing Club, which is an editor for making ASCII-inspired art but with full range of unicode characters, and Grid Drawing Club, an online editor for assembling web elements to create intricate web-mosaics. I used Grid Drawing Club to create the logo and frame at the top of this page.
Unicode Drawing Club outputs plain text! Coming later to the web.
