Medialab Katowice

Typo-graph is an experimental way to visualise data using typography as the building blocks of the image. Typographers strive to achieve a uniform column contrast, i.e. a balanced legible text layout. This is sometimes referred to as column ‘greyness’, a term that dates back to the early days of printing, when letters were usually printed in black and dense column of text when viewed from a distance gave the impression of a more or less uniform plane of grey. Modern digital typefaces come in a variety of different weights, offering a wide range of ‘shades of grey’. Hence the idea to use this potential in data visualisation. The intensity of the flow of certain phenomena in time is shown by a computer programmed weight variation of the typeface used for typesetting. The resulting image can be read from a distance as the visualisation of the intensity of the phenomenon at hand, which, in close-up, doubles as its conventional textual description. Find out more.