03. 10 Ideas for /kəˈkuːn/ (final project)

Introduction

Our final project will be called /kəˈkuːn/ it is based on a Ms.Rachel song about caterpillars becoming butterflies. The reason being, with this final project, you will begin your transformation and gain facility toward taking flight as a type designer. As such, this project will require more sustained attention on something that you should care about for a larger part of the semester. As such, I am asking you to think about what you will do for this project now.

You will start this process, by thinking of 10 (ten) ideas. You will do it similar to Cory Arcangel's Continual Partial Awareness

Cory Arcangel's Continual Partial Awareness

This piece is a performance lecture by the artist Cory Arcangel. In it, he "gives away" a list of ideas he no longer wants to do, does not have time to do, or were otherwise unrealized. It is linked below as both a video and a .PDF. Here he talks about his ideas in depth, where they might have come from, or why he abandoned them. Each of the ideas are not given equal time as some are too "nerdy" to describe quickly, some you just need to hear or see part of to "get," while others require greater contextualization. There is not necessarily a fixed pattern, but you can tell his interest in each of them, and begin to get a picture of his work in general.

• video of the performance lecture↗
• complete list of ideas↗

What to know about the final

I don't have the exact terms of the final worked yet, but know that you will have to produce a more robust character set. This would approximate something like.

• upper and lower case
• numbers
• punctuation

And/or you may be asked to include some kind of extra glyphs for

• diacritics/accents
• ligatures
• contextual alternates
• weights
• stylistic sets
• variable axes

That being said, your idea may be "not directly alphabetical" or imagine directly including the Latin alphabet. For example something like:

• A redrawing of Hobo, but with a set of icons, or decorative patterns that match the style of the font.
• Redrawing the Runic Unicode block to look like it was drawn with a pointed pen
• Adding swashes and stylistic alternates to a redrawing of Wingdings

Homework (due 03/10/2026)

• Think of 10 ideas for /kəˈkuːn/ the final project. Write them in a .PDF or similar easily accessible text file.
• You must like all of them, you must believe in all of them.
• You cannot say you do not like them.
• You can discuss them with whatever level of detail you'd like (i.e. include rough sketches, or a related example, or simply say "make typeface from my dream"), but they must be understandable to a human external to you (i.e. Jack, me, or yourself in the future when explaining it to us).