Typography and Art

...and by "art" I mean the visual/graphic sort.

As I promised, here is the first of the detailed introductions to what I like to use my time for.

I think it started when I was taught - at the age of one or two i think - the latin alphabet (with the addition of the three danish letters æ, ø and å). I supposedly showed interest in my dad's computer and he descided to show me all the letters in big sizes on the screen. The first word I read by the way was "Astra", and yes that was read off of the car we had at the time - a green Opel.

I have also always been into drawing, and writing in different styles. And in what you would call middle school I wanted to be an animator for a living. So I suppose I have always been a typographer and an artist and Fontstruct was just the right (and let's not forget free) medium for me.

I played around with typography and words, and that lead to the study of different writingsystems (e.g. greek, cyrillic, japanese kana) and ambigrams and that sort. I've even been working on a mirror ambigram that reads "КРИСТИЯН?" (My name in Russian) and "CHRISTIAN" when mirrored. I know - that's really geeky, but hey, it'll make a good T-shirt design if I ever go to Russia. And even if I don't.

Oh, and that's another thing I've been thinking about doing, T-shirts, that might even make me some money for a change. Well, I am probably too nice when I give away my fonts for free, because I hate paying for stuff myself. So, anyways, making some T-shirts might make up for it. Hey, now I'm checking it seems like I already have a profile on Spreadshirt.com, I just haven't put any designs up. I'll be sure to do that and link to the shop from here.

I wanted to show you an example of the stuff I do, but the one I had in mind I'll save for later, but here is my latest fontstruction: 2D-barcode.

And right now I'm in the middle of my exams in gymnasium (equivalent to high school), so I probably shouldn't even be sitting up at night blogging. What I'm trying to say is that I don't know when I'll post again, but hope to do it soon.

That's it for now, I'll try to get some sleep now.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog. I've been thinking - for some time now - about creating a blog, and here it is.

So, where might you know me from? Well, you probably don't, but I'm an active user of fontstruct, over there I'm known as CMunk.

Other than that I can't think of anything, but if you see the name CMunk, chances are It's probably me, since I use that username everywhere, but I can't asure you that there aren't anyone else using the same name.

What can you expect from this blog? I'm a great deal into language and I am (hopefully) going to university starting this summer to study linguistics, so that will be a main topic of this page. I will also study Japanese on the side. I'm into conlanging, which is basically constructing your own language. You might know some famous conlangs like Esperanto, Volapük, Klingon or Na'vi. In my own attempts to create languages I have thought up a few setups, but haven't gotten much further than the phonology (what sounds the language has and how they are combined) yet.

I also like music and I play the piano and sing myself. I'm thinking of writing my own songs, but I can't promise that I will, but if I do they will be posted here also.

I read a few blogs as well that I might link to. Those could be haha.nu, a blog about interesting things (to me) from all over the internet; savagechickens.com, a cartoon drawn on sticky notes about chickens and their dayly philosophical questions.

And of course many of my fontstructions from now on will be posted here. And as a typographer I like to play around with letters and might make an ambigram once in a while.

You may be able to tell already that English is not my native language. I am from Denmark, but lived five years in Japan from when I was one year old to when I was six. I spoke fluent (kindergarten-level) Japanese, but don't speak a word of Japanese at the moment (hence the japanese course). Apart from Danish and English I speak and write German and a bit of Esperanto.

So that's pretty much it. I will go into further details about each of the topics in the next posts. I hope you will enjoy it once I get started.