Thank you for this interesting "dump" of thoughts! I have a few replies which for some reason came out backwards.
(6) I too started this incidental to another project (the diagrams) and now have ended up in this rabbit hole where it's become its own project.
(4) Creating this kind of "narrative" for the diagrams is definitely something I have considered. e.g. there could be a character who had written them all and we found them in a book in the character's lab. I have this recurring thought about them being found on a CRT monitor in a forest, half buried in the ground and covered in moss. But I haven't been able to get a CRT aesthetic working well with them and for now I'm sticking with the hand drawn look.
(1) Yeah I did consider labelling but I am not the arbiter of what makes sense haha. Also actually I think there are probably different axes in which you could create that kind of scale. Like sense versus truth for example. There is probably a whole article to write just around that.
Thanks again, I definitely will continue to share my work :)
Thanks! I'm the artist and it's nice to see this recognised. I have been worried with this project that people might think I should just use a LLM, but I think there is value in how controllable and explainable this is.
Ha yeah I am actually a designer, although I'm very UX focused rather than UI - and I'm definitely not a typographer. I am cringing a bit at the kerning at the moment, it's definitely still a work in progress! I guess though that my goal was to recreate handwriting, rather than to create a font. My handwriting doesn't have great kerning either.
Do you have any sources for computer art outside of the USA or Western Europe in the 50s and 60s? I'm sort of reliant on what comes up in extensive internet search missions that go down all kinds of rabbit holes, but I should have made more of an effort to figure out what was happening outside of USA/Europe at the time. I'd love to take a look and will work out a way either to include it in this article or in a later one.