Razzle Dazzle is a dynamic display typeface, inspired by dazzle painting, a ship camouflage used in World War 1. What this kind of camouflage seems to do, unlike some other forms of camouflage, it was designed to catch the attention while hiding something. What RD did was to make it difficult to try and understand a shape, its speed or direction.
The Razzle Dazzle type system comes in two styles, IN and OUT, and with some different patterns. This font is an experimental project to investigate the illegibility as aesthetic research but also as a functional tool. RD requires time to be read (in particular the OUT style) it needs to be looked closer and dedicate take time to decipher it. We want to hide out instead of show off, we want the reading to get closer before it goes away, we want people to take the right amount of time to understand and enjoy.
A project by:
Lorenzo Bravi and Paolo Palma
If you are interested in, write at:
dazzletypesystem@gmail.com
The design process starts with a Black Weight typeface and some different Dazzle Pattern, both designed on the same grid. Then we used Python script, and thanks to the Robofab library we generated all the syles combining RD-Black and all the patterns. For any style we generated many different variations of any single gliph and thanks to the OpenType features we can simulate the continuos variation of the text while the typing.