About Typotopo

Typotopo is a collection of projects that explore typography, interactivity, motion, and form. Through digital technology, we can look at new ways to express visual—and textual—messages. The experiments on this site represent a couple decades of combining type, lettering, words, and media in unexpected ways.

What does it mean to create maps of information spaces? If Borges’ fable of the one-to-one sized map of an imaginary kingdom has become true in the age of the Internet, the role of the map as an all-encompassing tool for representing the entirety of a region needs to change. Typotopo explores how new kinds of maps can make sense of the data overload, maps which make the journey more accessible.

The work here also stems from my long-time fascination with letters. These building blocks of written communication hold power as symbols that are at once representational and abstract. What are the secret lives of letters, and how can those lives be revealed? From an early age we learn to write letterforms in our own hand and recognize mechanically produced typeforms as the same symbols. When the keyboard replaces the pen as the writer’s primary tool, we lose the manual connection to the continuous handwritten mark in favor of the efficiency of digital reproduction. I’m interested in the relationship between the handwritten and the machine-made.

You can follow me, Peter Cho, at @typotopo and @pchocho on Instagram and @pcho on Twitter. See my professional profile at pcho.net.