Online Typographic Awareness

For my final, I would like to combine my work in Allison’s Computational Approaches to Typography class with what we’ve been learning in Live Web. I think this will be particularly interesting because we constantly look at text on the web, but it rarely is something that people interact with beyond clicking on links.

I think it would be interesting to give people an awareness of other people being in the same web space by having the type react to various user inputs. Mouse position is an obvious one, but there are also a bunch of super creepy things that I am interested in using like ambient light sensor, location, and whatnot. I’m basically going to browse through the MDN web API page and see what I can work with and what makes sense to give users an awareness of each other. I’m interested in using mostly passive inputs from the user, but I think it would be nice to have 1-2 active inputs (like buttons, text inputs).

I’m not 100% sure what the actually text content will be or how exactly I’d like to manage multiple users on the page. Socket.io seems like a solid choice, but I really liked the speed and decentralized nature of peer.js. I think I may use peer.js since I want to learn more about it.

Here are some references for other designers playing with interactive type.