Ricardas Blazukas » alphabet

Painting in Kuwait – Notational Alphabet

Ricardas — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 09:08:45 +0000

This post is dedicated to the second series of paintings that I am working on since my relocation to Kuwait.

This one is called ‘Notational Alphabet’. These geometrical compositions of squares, circles and triangles were developed in the process of creating an actual written alphabet. The alphabet can be found in my previous posts by clicking here and / or here.

The alphabet symbols were also explored through sculpture and these can be seen in the previous posts by clicking here ’Alphabet Models’ and ‘Miniature Alphabet Models’ here.

Woven Typography – DS15

Ricardas — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 12:39:48 +0000

This woven text sign was a design I did with my coursemates Tim Waines and Piotr Garstecki for Design Studio 15 End of Year Exhibition at Westminster University in July 2014.

The same typography that I developed for the ‘here comes everybody‘ ceramic piece was applied to create this woven DS15 sign.

Ceramic Typography – here comes everybody

Ricardas — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 11:59:10 +0000

This ceramic typography sign was a design I did for Design Studio 15 End of Year Exhibition at Westminster University in July 2014.

The typography of the sign as well as its aesthetic quality was designed using chance techniques. The letters are assembled out of small hand-pressed interconnecting clay components. Raku method of firing ceramics was used as a generator of chance in producing the unexpected aesthetic of glazes. The result of the experiment is typography with fascinating variety of colours and textures.

Thanks to Tim Waines and Piotr Garstecki for their huge contribution on this piece.

Portfolio Catalogues

Ricardas — Fri, 24 Jan 2014 16:06:41 +0000

Here’s the design for my portfolio catalogues for the midyear review submission at Westminster University Architecture School in London.

Alphabet Miniature Models

Ricardas — Fri, 24 Jan 2014 14:37:58 +0000

My miniature alphabet models, a set of 12, single cast with 3 colours of plaster.

Moulds made of three main parts, which were shuffled by chance using I Ching.

Initial graphic drawing of these can be found here.

Graffiti Alphabet

Ricardas — Fri, 24 Jan 2014 14:03:57 +0000

Here are some examples of a spray painted version of the alphabet.

Post Installation Model

Ricardas — Fri, 24 Jan 2014 13:39:10 +0000

Since the full scale installation (previously posted) did not last very long due to its nature, I decided to make this small model representing the same qualities, such as escaping a conventional grid (random sizes of the blocks stacked together), chance factor of variety of paintings in its defragmented state and a sculptural way of representation of the alphabet.

Installation / Time Lapse Video

Ricardas — Sat, 30 Nov 2013 19:03:53 +0000

I have done a number of projects on various scales during the last month. This one here is the biggest one of them – an installation.

Or watch in better quality on VIMEO

This might seem like just a graffiti / painting on a set of plinths, but there is more behind it. The idea I am fascinated about the most is – the provocation of students. This installation was done at university, on all plinths of our MArch Architecture studio a week before our interim crits.

Taking all the plinths might seem rude at first, but architecture is about behaviour change and interaction between a space and its users, which is what this installation did. The painting on the plinths gave them a sense of untouchability (or at least I hoped it will). I was curious what will happen with a crit day approaching. Will students start to take the plinths one by one? They belong to them as much as they belong to me.

I wanted to see a progressive defragmentation of this painting, but what I’ve discovered instead, not even 24hours after the installation was made – plinths composed randomly, looking somewhat similar to Picasso’s paintings. Brilliant – a number of coursemates decided to re-organize them.

I loved the idea of chance in this installation – stacking the plinths randomly and then painting a symbol on them left me wondering how will each plinth look like. The random sizes of plinths stacked together was also a way of escaping a typical grid. It also has an effective three-dimensional quality, due to lengths of plinths they can be spaced in a random way, again creating something completely different and completely by chance.

The crits went great too, as my tutor Sean Griffiths, Co-Founter of FAT said: “Ricardas, you have had the best presense during the crits today”, meaning that all students were presenting their models on plinths with a piece of my painted symbol.

I was hoping that after the crits I will collect them and stack them in a random way, but there was no need for that, as like I mentioned previously, it happened sooner than I expected thanks to my coursemates.

The painted symbol is from my own created alphabet, which you can check out here and download as a font here.

I have also made a small model of this installation, which will appear on the blog soon.

Above you will find a time-lapse video of the installation making process, and at the bottom a photo gallery of the installation, as well as a photo gallery of plinths being used in the studio by other students to display their work.

My I Ching T Shirt

Ricardas — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 11:39:06 +0000

I made myself an I Ching t-shirt for an interim crit that I had yesterday.

This year I’ve been working on a lot of stuff involving chance together with guys at DS15. I Ching is our core material that we base our studies on. Since the beginning of the year I loved the idea of assigning colour to hexagrams of I Ching. The hexagrams have a very strong graphic aesthetic and look brilliant on a tee. Making this for my crit was a great way to level up the presentation.

BUY?

I had some requests from people wanting to buy one like this, so I might get to it and make more soon. If you would love to invest in one, then give me a shout through a contact form below (inc. tee size) and I’ll keep you updated!

Alphabet – Q&A Session on Reddit

Ricardas — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 17:02:31 +0000

So I have posted my font download page on some forums and have received some questions, helpful statements and even signs of frustration. Thought would be a good idea to re-post those here. I guess this Q&A session just better explains the whole idea behind the alphabet.

Q – And how is it inspired by architecture? Doesn’t look like any known building element to me.

A – Why look at it so directly obviously? Can inspirations from architecture come only from a building or its element? It is about simple forms creating complex compositions and then those being translated into something writable and readable. Francesco Borromini drawn plans of his famous Baroque Architecture by composing simple geometrical shapes. Here’s a good example:

Example 1

Example 2

Q - Sorry but I can’t read it.

A – Can you read Chinese? In order to be able to read it one would have to learn it. Our Latin alphabet seems simple to us just because we are used to it since early days of our lives, but even then we had to go through a lot of effort to learn it at school.

Q - In fact I can read some chinese, as I have spent the last 9 months living here, but that’s not the point. The chinese language revolves (as it often does) around it’s alphabet and vice versa. You have no language to cater to.

All you have done is made an existing alphabet unreadable. You have not created an alphabet from what I can tell, but rather a font.

A – You are confusing an alphabet with a language. I have created an alphabet, but not a language; then applied a Times New Roman font to it. You can check the previous posts on a blog to see a written version of it.

This alphabet hasn’t got a language behind it, true, but it could be applied. And you are right, at the moment the symbols are only a translation of our latin alphabet.

Oxford Dictionary describes an alphabet as:

“a set of letters or symbols in a fixed order used to represent the basic set of speech sounds of a language, especially the set of letters from A to Z”

Q – uuuh… ok. so it looks like x=ks in this alphabet?

A – It is. This alphabet is more about an experiment of creating symbols/shapes that could be readable as letters, which was limited to 24 symbols rather than 26 as in Latin alphabet. In this case, posted previously on my blog, I created compositions from squares, circles and triangles, which then developed into a simplified writable form and then was respresented as a Times New Roman style font.

4 – And little more analytical comment from user Lilalindy

In order to learn how to read this, people are have to going to remember a new set of shapes – a bit like learning wingdings so that you can read a piece of writing set out in that instead of the usual alphabet we see in ASCII.

Writing is just a representation of sound on paper (or some other medium that is capable of presenting an equivalent).

If you want to be truly inventive, then look at the way that alphasyllabaries or abugidas work and thus, make it worthwhile for the learner to take on your writing system.

With abugidas, you can represent sounds in a way that is unambiguous (they are phonetic). They take words and break them up into syllables and then represent each syllable with a set of marks that tells the reader how to make the sound.

Devanagari is a sufficiently rich abugida and you can use it to write down sounds from pretty much any language – if the reader knows to read it in the way that Sanskrit is written – all of it is explicit – then you can use it to remember how foreign words sound (the Latin alphabet is very poor at this task unless you are familiar with the way it is interpreted for a give language). Using a similar alphasyllabary (Gurmukhi), I could write down …

ਯਾ ਸਮ ਬੀਓ ਪੀਆਨ ਸੀਐਲੋ ਸੈਡਮਿਤਸੂ – Ja sam bio pijan cijelu sedamicu. (Bosnian)

ਅਮ ਫਾਸਤ ਬੀਅਤ ਤੋਆਤਾ ਸਪਤਾਮਿਨਾ – Am fost beat toată săptămâna. (Romanian)

In the second one, ‘beat’ would end up being pronounced like ‘beet’ and in the first, ‘bio’ would end up being pronounced like the ‘bio’ in ‘biology’ rather than ‘bee-oh’ and, if you don’t know what the accents do, it is a non-starter.

I took the Gurmukhi alphasyllabary (which I already know, I write my shopping list in it every day, I am that familiar with it) and produced a variant that looks like the U-Chan writing system (which is also an Abugida) and as a result, people who can read Gurmukhi as fluently as I can (in addition to those who leave me on the starting blocks) can read it without any problem. I even have a tee-shirt with article one of the UDHR in Punjabi written on it in that font and people can read it without any help but to the unsuspecting, it looks like U-Chen.

I like the idea of alternative writing systems but the characters need to be sufficiently differentiated and also worthwhile getting to know. If they represent in some way the way that the sound is produced then they are easier to learn and more worthwhile – look at the characters for pa, pha, ba, and ma (all labial consonants – look at the way the alphabet is laid out and see how much better it is than ‘abcdefg’) are written in U-Chan.

Keep up the good work – it is good to see fresh ideas.