MFT: Polona Typo

Text customization is always a fun thing to do. It can add some attitude to the text, it is also a nice way of adding another layer of narrative through the texture of letters itself.

Typo.Polona is a text customizing tool developed by Huncwot for National Library of Poland. It puts to use library's vast archives of books and magazines in a more creative fashion. Instead of simply making digitized documents available online, it took an additional step further.

The logic is simple: since the texts were already digitized and recognized via optical character recognition - why not apply a creative use of such material in a manner of visual letter collage. After all, it wasn't a big deal to slice them up by the letters, segment and pack them into a database and make them ready to construct something else.

In the heart of Polona.Typo is the text. Users have 35 characters to type a text or a word and customize its appearance with a little help of library's seeming bottomless archives. (However, some of the swear words are bleeped. Not a big loss, though). There is a lot to choose from. The range of source materials goes from medieval manuscripts to sleek early 20th century typography and oldschool late 19th stuff.

Because of limitations, the best way to use Polona.Typo is to visualize pwoermds - word poems that itself are elaborate mashes if different words. It is an ideal alliance for such type of text. Text collage itself combined with visual collage.

The sequence of letters is randomized. By default you get a hodgepodge of styles. But you can manually adjust it to your taste. Hopefully, there are multiple settings that allow to narrow down the selection to a specific time periods and styles.

Big flaw is lack of diversity in punctuation images. While you get a selection of comas and dots there is not much else. You have one pair of dashes, a couple of hyphens, a bit of semicolons and colons and not much in terms of everything else. It is not very helpful if you want to make font collage with a punctuation poem.

As a side feature user can play a bit with positioning of the letters. Basically it shakes them slightly and often puts awry. It is not particularly helpful.