Visual Cryptography through Typography - TypeLab Asia 2022

Research presented at TypeLab Asia 2022 https://2022.typographics.com/typelab/ Visual cryptography is one of the techniques used for encrypting messages. As the name suggests, messages are encrypted in a visual format such as images and typography. One of the best-known techniques involves breaking an image into parts, so that only someone with all the parts can decrypt the image. Some techniques also use typography as a tool, such as Turing Fonts where symbols of the fonts are unordered on purpose, Bacon Cipher which involves the usage of two typefaces, and Printer Steganography in which secret yellow dots are printed on paper encoding the details of the device a page was printed from. This study is an exploration of how typography can facilitate visual cryptography. The result of this ongoing research are typefaces that are as much as a puzzle to solve, as they are a message to read. In plain sight these typefaces might look like random patterns but when looked closely they reveal the hidden message they carry. Such typefaces have a Pareidolia effect. Pareidolia is one such effect that falls into grey area between the encrypted and decrypted. It is an effect of perception we impose with a meaningful interpretation so that we see an object or meaning, when there is none. For example, a cloud might look like dinosaur, or the texture on a floor tile might be perceived as a face. Pareidolia can be used in visual cryptography where the letterforms and typography exist in the grey area of legibility and unreadable. By relaxing the constraints of legibility, I have created letterforms in a way that requires you to pay attention to them. I used a programmatic method to create these fonts. As we have 0s and 1s in binary as elements and when a bunch of them put together in a structure i.e., in a line, a code is formed. In a similar way, I took basic shapes like circles and triangles as my elements and the structure became the grid using which I arrange these shapes. Methods of reading these messages such as either paying close attention, blocking the noise with a stencil key, combining all the broken parts or by morphing into another shape, can allow sharing secret messages out in the open via these fonts. They can act as an Easter egg, an extra surprise for the devoted ones. As, these fonts are morphed and often broken into pieces to encrypt a message the applications of these fonts also bridge the physical and digital world, making a message more interactive to read.