Rob Lycett Creative Suite 3: Morpholo

 Morpholo Task

This workshop with Rob Lycett was an interesting one, the task was to create our own version of a Morpholo. The Morpholo is a 'combinatria' of square tiles (carreaux) which can be arranged in different manners, as a game, or as art. The tiles, which contain black and white shapes that can be juxtaposed at will, yielding (at least) several billion unforeseen larger shapes. There is only one rule with this, we must match , on the edges, black against black and white against white. The Morpholo tile game was devised by Thieri Foulc in 1985.

This passage was extracted from the worksheet provided with the task. This workshop was an introduction to Adobe Illustrator CC in which the session would be focusing upon the basic pen tool in relation to drawing/rendering and the manipulation of typographic forms. Our task today was to create 12 100mm square tiles 

A slightly confusing process to this was the 8 bit binary number, this was an 8 digit code consisting of 1 and 0, this was how we determined what the Morpholo tile would look like. To begin with we chose 12 random numbers from a grid ranging from 0 to 255, using a decoder of sorts we were able to obtain the 8 digit binary number of each of the 12 selected numbers an example of this is 171 = '10101011'. The 100mm square tiles were then split into 4, creating 2 sides on each side of the square and 8 sides in total, the 8 sides would then determine if that section was white or black. If the number is 1 it is black, and if the number is 0, it is white so using the example 8 digit number from before (10101011) it would create the following tile

On Unilearn in the workshops file we there was a Morpholo tile maker where when we inserted the 8 digit code it would create the corresponding tile below are the 12 resulting tiles for my selected numbers.

With the tiles made I was able to begin manipulating typographic vectors to create my own personal tiles, I wanted to use a sans serif bold and blocky font as my base to manipulate due to it being simplistic in design. The font varied in size, shape and rotation to ensure that each of the black sections of the tiles were covered. Below are two examples of this design.

Due to an unforeseen circumstance I was unable to complete all 12 tiles during the workshop session, In the near future after the summative deadline, I would like to complete, print and document the outcome of the Morpholo task, a design idea I had was creating glitchy pixelated typographic art to display on the tiles. The reason for a typographic glitch design is because for my first year my design theme has been inspired by digital glitches and designing imperfection. 

Any future progress will be added to this blog.