Role: Designer, Art Director
Did: Type design, Research, AI Prompting, Web Development 
Used: Glyphs, Indesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Processing, ChatGPT, Javascript, HTML, CSS

Instructor: Ryan Waller
Instructor: Minkyoung Kim

Coding mutation into type

Cellular Transfigurations is a custom type family and specimen book that positions code as a disruptive collaborator in typographic form. The base typeface was meticulously drawn in Illustrator, establishing a controlled structural system. From this foundation, I developed p5.js algorithms—iteratively refined through AI-assisted prompting—to destabilize and mutate the letterforms.

Inspired by biologically immortal organisms such as Schmidtea mediterranea (planarian flatworm) and Turritopsis dohrnii (the “immortal” jellyfish), the generative scripts stretch, fragment, erode, and regenerate typographic anatomy. Each transformation introduces variation beyond static authorship, allowing the forms to behave less like fixed symbols and more like adaptive organisms.

The project challenges typographic conventions of permanence, legibility, and designer control. By pushing text toward the threshold of unreadability, Cellular Transfigurations asks a speculative question: if life—or information—could persist indefinitely, would meaning remain intact?

Through the integration of drawing, system design, and generative disruption, the work proposes a new visual language in which typography is not stable infrastructure, but a living, evolving system.