Studies
Four covers, four systems.
Self-directed typographic work. No client, no brief. Each one sets a rule for how letters are built and then follows it to the end of the page.
Common Market
Letters cut from the same circles and wedges as the panel beneath them, so the title and the illustration are made of one alphabet of shapes. Red, yellow, white, black on stone.
Counterform
Every letter is assembled from a small kit of arcs and straight edges, packed until the gaps between them carry as much weight as the strokes. The title is the method.
Second Skin
A high-contrast serif with a second surface folded through it. The ribbon behaves like cloth on a body: it follows the stroke, passes behind it, and changes the letter without redrawing it.
Hound Error
A houndstooth loses its grid along a diagonal and reassembles as the title. One tooth is printed blue: the place the error starts.
The system under each one
Nine categories built from the same circles and wedges, and one of them at full page size.
The kit laid out (round, half, quarter, bar, wedge, arch), and C, O and R built from it over the construction grid.
One letter at full size with the ribbon crossing it, then the drawing and the surface shown apart.
The four states in order: whole, one tooth out of true, the grid apart, and the teeth settled as a letter.
The same rule, running.
The printed cover is one frame of this. Every tooth knows where it sits, whether it falls inside the letterforms, and how close the error front has come. Teeth in the front displace and turn; behind it the check comes back, never quite square again, and the teeth the words need have packed solid. One tooth is cobalt: the seed.
About a quarter of the field is disturbed at any moment, so the pattern is always legible as a pattern. Canvas, no libraries. It pauses off screen and holds one still frame for anyone who asks for reduced motion.
The cover is the piece. This is what it does.
About these
Four studies, made to work out a typographic idea at book scale. No client and no brief. The covers are the finished artefact, made digitally; Hound Error is the only one that also exists as code.