Text and design distortion

The recent Tune Tech episode on Twenty Thousand Hertz covered the history of distortion in popular music. That got me thinking about the use of distortion in other media like UI design and film.

Toys in the Static (2023), "P-Type Ringing Across the Sea" 

I’ve been musing about Uncanny UI recently, and came across “glitch art” which is all about distortion. See e.g. #glitchart on YouTube. See also one by Himelstein on r/glitch_art, and Indigo Wounds by ORACLE02000.

Distorted fonts are a thing, but I find them rather boring. ZXX, for example, was a heavily distorted font that supposedly made it hard for the NSA read communications—as long as they were printed images, that is (see the discussion by Graham Cluley). Emil Kozole’s Random typeface “features six alternatives of each glyph that shuffle automatically and create random contextual combinations”; they sure are random, to the point of illegibility. A more controlled (and to my eye, more interesting) effect was reported in Knuth’s “Mathematical Typography” (StackExchange extract, see Fig. 21 below; see also the StackExchange thread, “How do I make my document look like it was written by a Cthulhu-worshipping madman?”).

Knuth, D. E. (1979). Mathematical typography. Bull. Amer. Math. Soc., 1, 337–372. https://doi.org/10.1090/S0273-0979-1979-14598-1

Slippery subtlety

These examples are too all-or-nothing for my taste. There is a uniformity and continuity in the amount of distortion of each example. I’d rather the distortion creeps up on me, or is one thread in an otherwise harmonious tapestry. Here are some examples, all of them under the shadow of the “If I can think of something, it’s already been done” Rule.

A font which varies in its amount of distortion as the letters get used (i.e., a letter gets rendered a slightly different way every time, sometimes more distorted and other times less) (see StackExchange thread above). I can imagine some ways to do this. OpenType variable fonts could be used to introduce random variations in the rendering of glyphs, though it typically used for smooth transitions between styles. Presumably another SMOP would be to manipulate fonts in real-time using scripting languages or libraries like Three.js. Alternatively, https://instafonts.io/create seems to do randomized font generation, but each occurrence of a glyph is the same.

A web page design where the alignments are just sliiiightly off in some places, or the design colors are sometime just sliiiightly different – might be a way to subliminally draw a user’s attention

In film, rather than have the whole film be surreal (like the short AI-assisted film Thank You For Not Answering by Paul Trillo, or Wes Anderson’s color palette), the color balance shifts just slightly from one cut to another – not enough to notice, but enough to make you uncomfortable. 

In prose, an “anti-grammar checker” that adds back infelicities, e.g., randomly breaking Strunk & White’s commandments: multiple topics in one paragraph or one topic spread over many paragraphs; use the passive voice; add in and multiply redundantly superfluous words and verbiage; use multiple tenses; put emphatic words in the middle of sentences. 

A more general version would be an LLM that slowly cycled the temperature parameter up and down, from sentence to sentence. A chatbot that shifted from being play-it-safe corporate counsel to manic surrealist and back again.

It would be interesting to combine a fluctuating font with a dull-to-deranged chatbot, with a very staid font when the text was at its most manic, become more disjointed as the text became more staid.