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:
I have an idea for repeated letters and perhaps something to distinguish letter order using colour coding, they may appear in version 2
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
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.
Of course you can , 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
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 .
Or you can choose a named predefined Mathematica colour scheme here.