Creation Myth
GlyphWorld is a typeface of nine landscapes developed by Leah Maldonado.Special thanks to:Tyler AlexanderBrandon BraunWalton BrushJules DurandElla HigginsNoah PorterGavin RearSean SchumacherMisha Tahir
Experiencing a letterform is like entering a world within a world. Letterforms are the visual symbols of our speech; our speech, the auditory representation of our thoughts; our thoughts, the ethereal blocks that build our reality. With our writing systems we speak telepathically, transferring thoughts via little black marks. These black marks are part of our shared reality and are tools for recording and transmitting the past and the future. Letterforms live in a universe nested within our own, affected by what affects their authors. But they are their own creations.
Their forms have been shaped by a lineage of our ancestors and will continue to evolve past the death of their authors. Each new author follows and simultaneously betrays the rules of the previous authors, creating new styles of nuanced letterforms. Readers feel these stylizations as a multi-sensory experience. First, the body feels the structural form through the eyes. Then the ear hears what our eyes touch and translates this into a tone that is experienced internally. These silently heard tones are like the audible inflections we use in speech, where a tone can change the meaning of the content. Stylized letterforms enable our telepathic voices to be as expressive as our outer voices, equalizing the cacophony of our inner and outer worlds.
The letterform is a product of our collective selves, but also a product of an individual self. To experience its form is to experience a layered set of impressions, first those of a collected perspective and later from a personal perspective.
Gardens are like this—existing because of the collaboration of the universe and the individual. As we walk through other people's gardens we see the universe: familiar things that might exist in other gardens, imagined or real. But we also notice the author, the gardener. We notice the gardener's choices, some practical, some decorative, we see the landscape that the author has created, but we understand the gardener must use the land that the universe has created. A typeface is this way. It's author is a gardener who creates something to sustain and adhere to a system that is beyond them. GlyphWorld is my garden. Each stylized letterforms has been planted and nurtured by me. I am their author, I grew them—but they will continue to grow without me.