An example of Graphical Word Tokens

Radial Alphabet Tokens

I’ve been playing around with alternate ways of representing words in graphical form.

The current theme is to have each unique letter in a word captured as a position on a circle.

Individual letters occupy specific positions around the circumference, in the same way that hours are represented on a clock face, these could be described as Radial Alphabet Tokens.

The image below shows the whole alphabet displayed in one graphical token.

Alphabet - Simple Form

Words are represented by the subset of the alphabet they contain, so geography would be shown like this.

Geography

Note that the two Gs share one radial location and letters are not represented in order.

The phrase ‘the long goodbye’ is made up of three word tokens.

The Long Goodbye

This style of token is visually simple but not particularly striking.

Things get a lot more appealing when we add some colour, with each segment between the letters in the symbol being shaded.

Shaded Alphabet

Introducing colour allows for different layers of interpretation to be added to the radial alphabet tokens. A STOP sign could be rendered in shades of red like this ( we get a cleaner visual look by dropping the text labels from around the outside).

Stop

Exit

Using a spectrum of colours gives more vibrant tokens.

Coloured Alphabet

Coloured - The Long Goodbye

The use of colouring schemes to convey meaning is quite flexible and can be adapted to fit the desired application of the tokens and provide a unique visual identification method.

Nice - these could be cool for generating uniqueish fingerprints or symbols for stuff. Reminds me of the Walking Numbers paper, where they do almost the same as your second diagram, but instead of putting all the lines on a single circle, you join each one to the previous, creating a wandering line.

This is Pi rendered in base-4, to 100bn digits. The number starts at red, and wandsers up the spectrunm:

That makes a very colourful numerically inspired random walk!

I could picture a makerspace full of items decorated with circular stickers along the lines of:

HackMe - DoNotTouch

Or in a bolder colour scheme:

Or labels with personalised colour combinations representing their owner, along the lines of Gravatars.

Cylindric

Can you make that last one into a cylinder?

Hopefully for obvious reasons :smiley:

Nice one

I wonder what can be done to indicate anagram-collisions.

I have an idea for repeated letters and perhaps something to distinguish letter order using colour coding, they may appear in version 2 :wink:

I think the initial goal was to have distinctive visual symbols which can be used in specific contexts. Like identifying people, indicating the use conditions of equipment or things, conveying public information, bringing a consistent visual style through the use of colour palettes to an organisation.

Yeah, I like them. I suspect they sort of don’t mean anything consciously, but one will soon start to associate them with whatever they mean, based on context and repetition. How are you generating them? Are they a Mathematica script?

Yes, good use of colour would probably help with that association.

Would it be made in anything else :wink:

Currently they are implemented in a Mathematica notebook, but that might be reworked to be a CLI based version which could then be generated/served via Mathematica on a Raspberry Pi.

Just spotted you’ve updated your icon, loving it !

Other colour choices are available if it’s too bright :slight_smile:

For the little avatar I actually quite like it. The massive 450px version is a little bright :slight_smile:

Can I have one? Pretty please? :slight_smile:

Of course you can :slight_smile: , later when I’m more organised people can pick their own colours, but read back and you’ll see you already have one, albeit with text added :wink:

Does that colour palette suit ? If not give me one or more RGB colours you like and I’ll rustle one up without text for you . :slight_smile:

Or you can choose a named predefined Mathematica colour scheme here.

I hacked your account and added the one @stochastic_forest generated above :stuck_out_tongue:

Awesome :slight_smile:

Mathematica on the rPi is free, right? Maybe we need a server that can be polled to generate these on request :slight_smile:

Yes it is free and yes, that’s what I was trying not to think about :wink:

Derp, I didn’t even see :slight_smile: too many thread updates! I like it.