JON GERLACH    

Destructive Typography

This project originally stemmed from the question, “How much can letterforms change before they become unrecognizable?”

The purpose of this site is to allow people to play with bitmap fonts and destroy phrases that they, or others, have submitted. Along with the mouse, a panel of settings lets the user decide how the words will be destroyed.

My original question was never directly answered (because the project’s purpose has evolved) but it’s good to keep in mind when interacting with this piece.

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Cluttered: A Digital Junk Drawer

It seems that most people had a junk drawer of some sort when they were young. Mine was a treasure-trove of small toys, doodads, stickers, and all things strange. Nobody really knew how things found their way into the drawer, and they sure as hell never escaped.

Cluttered takes the junk drawer and puts it online — allowing users to sort through and discover some of the strange, weird and awkward bits of a larger collection of things found in this particular junk drawer.

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Image Mashups

This project was part of my introduction to Processing. As such, my focus was on creating something simple and visually appealing to wet my feet and appetite.

Processing takes in audio data from a chosen song and additively stores that information in an array. Once the value of a position in the array exceeds a certain amount, a set of pixels that corresponds to that position will show a new image.

Viewing the final images separately from the video provides two different understandings of the project. So, I suggest taking a moment to look at the images before jumping into the videos.

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Give Your Time • Take Your Time

Stefan Sagmeister issued a design challenge to the students at RIT; “Touch someone’s heart with design.”

Like a lot of people, I find there are so few hours left at the end of the day to spend freely and with the people I love. The concept of this piece was balance; how to find time for oneself and others amid a techno-centric and otherwise fast pased world.

Each disk is mounted onto a clock. Every five minutes one of the slots in the disks aligns with a suggestion of how the viewer can give or take their time.

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Beer Visualization

This is the age of craft beer. With so many different styles and breweries to choose from, the possibilities are dizzying.

This animation is for a website that would help beer lovers select their next pint using a few variants. Users would be able to save their favorite brews for future reference.

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Experimental Typography

Being a design student, it almost goes without saying, but I love typography.

This video was a chance to step outside of my normal set of constraints and explore a handful of different type treatments. The possibilities were endless and there’s a lot more that I would like to do it with, but for now it remains in it’s unfinished state.

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Recyclean Website

The concept behind the Recyclean site was to deliver facts about recycling in a way that is modern, clean and clear; making the point that recycling doesn’t need to be considered a dirty process.

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