A visual language

Forms

For over a decade the foundation has been children’s building blocks. I’ve built a personal vocabulary of shapes from them. Each one carries meaning.

Typoe

Rule one

Balance. Every piece could fall.

Rule two

Light and dark. One serves the other.

The forms are the words. How they stack is the grammar. A block alone is a block. A raven on a block is a sentence.

The Afterlife

The dark half. The forms that acknowledge what ends.

Ravens and tombstones, hourglasses, to reference life, time and death.

Typoe, Toys for Boys Magazine, 2017

The Happy Place

The light half. Childhood, and what it becomes.

It's this balance of the happiness in life and the darkness in life. And I think part of the balance is how one serves the other.

Typoe, Miami New Times, 2021

The World Around Me

Art history, fashion, nature. The forms borrowed from looking.

I've created many of my own shapes referencing art history, fashion, nature, connectivity, and the afterlife. The two themes I used throughout the blocks are balance and building the world around us.

Typoe, The Spaces, 2022

The Blocks

Friedrich Froebel invented kindergarten and building blocks in the 1830s. The Bauhaus made its own set in 1923. These are the pieces everything else stands on.

I started with the basic building block shapes, like triangles, rectangles, squares, and archways. But I thought it would be fun to create my own shapes and icons.

Typoe, Artnet News, 2022