LollyBlob

“Can a typeface be inspired by a treat?”

—Duration: 3 months
—Scope: Type Design
—Tools: Glyphs 3 (+hands & aspiration)

LollyBlob is a display typeface inspired by the shape of sweet nostalgic melting candies and lagging pixels, combining the frustrations of 2 generations. It was designed to make bold statements—hence the blocky and sturdy appearance.

Remember, LollyBlob isn't just Regular. It is served with an Oblique & Cursive version, and multilingual characters.

Process

LollyBlob started as a tiny sketch of a stylized m on a page of my sketchbook. LollyBlob then evolved into a system of letters that had adapted their shapes to one another.

Essentially, all characters are designed with a grid and built by square blocks. Taking the inspiration from soft edges of melted sugar, I rounded all corners of the characters to replicate that look. Diagonal lines are also thinned out to further portray that idea.

Experiment 1
Speech to Text Tool
I needed a tool that can detect what the user is saying, since I want the website to be totally about sounds. It had be precise enough to detect the list of words I wanted like to include.
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After experimenting with a few different tools, I ended up choosing P5.js' speech recognition tool.
Experiment 2
Hosting a Website
The project is an educational one, hence I wanted people other than myself to be able to access and use it. This is a new thing to someone who had only hosted locally like myself.
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I tried Codesandbox at first, then switched to Github for easier usage.
Experiment 3
Styling elements
In order to make the project more engaging, I’d need  to add styling elements to the website. Before this project, I had been practicing both JS and CSS, but never tried to combine them.
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This turned out to be much more straightforward than I thought!