David Small - Expressive Typography - Master Thesis

I really enjoyed reading David Small’s 1990 Masters Thesis on Expressive Typography. The depth that he went into for many of the techniques through which to use typography in the electronic environment really highlighted the way in which we take many of these computational aspects for granted today, because they are so easily accessible. Many of these ideas were well ahead of their time. For example, Small goes into the details of the physics of the movement of individual points across a page, as well as the matrix setup to transform points to a new distorted space. Additionally, the section on “Wet Fonts” highlighted the work of the Connection Machine with the goal of simulating the actions of water and pigments on paper. Small discussed the parallel computing architecture of this process, where each fiber is a pixel that contains information on the “pigment it contains, how wet it is, how absorbent it is, its x and y location, and the color it computes to send to the display.” He also describes how this method can be implemented with a pressure sensitive stylus. This is a method that is incredibly common now in digital art (I personally really enjoy using a “watercolor brush” on Adobe Fresco using a pressure sensitive stylus).