Character Development

This window display is for lovers of typography and Rorschach tests. Located at 401 Richmond, ‘Character Development’ can be found decorating the paned window of swipe design books + objects. At any time of day or night from street-view (or during business hours from inside), viewers can stop to look at each character as it cascades across the window, gradually morphing through different forms of the same word to inspire new meanings against the cityscape. The designer invites viewers to think less about what each design means, and more about what they interpret from the abstracted designs.

‘Character Development’ is an ongoing project exploring the elasticity of typography through the experimentation and abstraction of the character “美” (pronounced “mi”), meaning “beauty” in Japanese and Chinese. The designs showcased are from the designer’s first iterations of illustrative research from January 2025. With each iteration, the boundaries of language and typography were questioned. Typography is a channel for words and letters to create alternate realities, so how do other cultures with different languages speak these realities into an existence unlike ours?

Like many other languages, Japanese and Chinese characters have the ability to illustrate their meaning as well as speak it. In the same way that some characters represent their meaning in its strokes, experimenting with abstracted interpretations of this character have inspired new meanings – like a Rorschach test. Just as “美” means “beauty”, ‘Character Development’ is also seeking new ways of representing beauty in language, typography, and visual art.