Warning: Do not click on this link if you are subject to motion sickness; it's an unsettling experience anyway. Simon Whitechapel has created a font in which each letter is constantly moving:
Rotor is an experimental script created to realize the concept of letters that literally move on the “page”. It consists of seventeen minimal pairs of graphemes in which the members of each pair are identical except for the way they move: unvoiced consonants and the first member of the pairs m n, w y, l r, h j, q x, a o, “. :”, “, ;”, “ ‘ ’ ”, and “! ?” turn clockwise, voiced consonants and the second member of the pairs turn anti-clockwise (c rocks first clockwise, then anti-clockwise). Of the remaining graphemes, e turns a vertical figure-of-eight and u a horizontal one, and i alone, consisting of two “zoophors” turning clockwise, is unambiguous when at rest.While I admire the ingenuity, I cannot bring myself to regard this as a Good Thing. (Via No-sword.) Posted by languagehat at March 21, 2005 12:21 PM
When I get home from work it goes into my logo.
Posted by: John Emerson at March 21, 2005 12:30 PMThanks LH...now I'll have the "ants on my monitor" dream again tonight.
Posted by: boo at March 21, 2005 12:39 PMThat's quite spectacularly perverse; from an antiergonomic point of view, I think it surpasses even the QWERTY keyboard. Don't learners of the Latin alphabet have enough trouble distinguishing b and d, or remembering to write N rather than И, without having to worry about letters that won't sit still?
Posted by: Q. Pheevr at March 21, 2005 04:04 PMWhy is it a bunch of random shapes? Why isn't it the actual letters rotating?
That would be cool to see.
Ned--you have to make sure that you have "gif animation" enabled on your browser--then you'll get the motion. Then you might wish you hadn't!
Posted by: Pete at March 21, 2005 11:44 PMImagine what this font would look like in German!
Posted by: Елизавета at March 22, 2005 12:18 AMI've got two comments—pick one and enjoy:
1) It's like Murphy's Law expressed in font design.
2) It's like the reductio ad absurdum of font design.
Posted by: The Tensor at March 22, 2005 05:26 AMIn a comment to that post on my blog, Tim May pointed out an even less useful font by the same author: Rebuqqan.
Posted by: Matt at March 22, 2005 07:00 AMPete: I think Ned sees the rotation, he simply thinks it would make more sense to have the actual letters of our alphabet rotating. But making sense is clearly not an issue here.
Matt: Yikes!
Posted by: language hat at March 22, 2005 07:52 AMAliens attack!
Posted by: Tatyana at March 22, 2005 09:19 AMDamn, I can't get it to work on my site.
Posted by: John Emerson at March 22, 2005 12:04 PMThe logical and perhaps more practical extension of this idea would be a font of sign language words, say, the top 150 most-common, that show animated hands doing the sign in miniature. Might not work for some that require full-body movement (such as a touch to the head or the downward patting motion at the waist).
Posted by: Grant Barrett at March 22, 2005 02:03 PMThe hands and body in sign language aren't worth much without the face (in terms of sentences, at any rate).
A fingerspelling font (where a single hand changes to spell out a world - or two hands for the British finger alphabet) might be kind of a cool.
Posted by: Michael Farris at March 22, 2005 03:03 PMI've first seen Rotor Script in Omniglot. I liked it but I still find Lovecraftian more creative ;)
Posted by: candi at March 23, 2005 12:29 PMHow would you handwrite this?
Posted by: jeke at March 23, 2005 03:58 PMPerverse is the word! My lord, what if you're dyslexic? --I don't think there's any .wav or sound files associated with this weirdo font (or site; Rotor isn't the only bizarre font that Simon has created), but I have been intrigued by the notion of vibrations associated with each of the phonemes represented by Rotor. Maybe this font would make more sense if you could "hear" the phonemes as opposed to just seeing them (and seeing them makes me cross-eyed)...Maybe Rotor could find a practical application as a standard form of telepathic communication...(Maybe none of these ramblings make sense -- well, it's because I've just toured Simon's site, and I'm still dazed, not to mention confused.)
Posted by: Going Dotty in Kansas at March 23, 2005 04:59 PMPresumably you handwrite it by making a flickbook..
Posted by: Matt at March 23, 2005 08:27 PMCelestial Beauty! Stunningly Beautiful! Ravishing! And deadly too, for me it is deadly. I am born with a certain brain condition called migraine accompagnée, a variant of the Holy Sickness, which means I do not need drugs to be drugged. Or go blind by the peculiar effects of this affliction. I must not look at this Divine Rotor again. If I want to stay sane.
Posted by: Folkert at March 23, 2005 08:36 PMSo, I bet if people learnt it, they'd get fast enough at reading it very quickly and they'd ignore the direction of the rotation and deal with the massive underdeterminism of the characters.
Posted by: Claire at March 24, 2005 10:41 AMAssuming that nobody will ever set their mind on learning to read this font, this idea seems more adapted to the notion of translating text into unique (and essentially abstract) animated graphic expressions. There's no good reason to limit the translation to a set of similar characters, or to arrange them on left-to-right lines. Instead, one could write (for instance) a code that translates letters into a wider variety of shapes, and the lets the succeeding letter dictate that shapes color, and the one after that dictate it's motion (not just rotations but movement around the screen). In theory it would be possible to "read" or decode the result, but the main point would be to create art dictated by a specific program and input code. Maybe somebody's done it already -- I've seen some things using at least parts of this idea.
Posted by: Martin at March 25, 2005 10:32 AMI've already begun to create a whole set of rotating proofreader's marks to accompany the font.
Posted by: paulmiki at May 10, 2005 07:24 PM