There are also new forms of punctuation and weird ligatures that suggest sounds produced by an alien vocal tract. Something bold and shouty and declarative.įor a later scene in which the Omniscient Narrator (me, the author) somehow incarnates inside my own book, I designed a font that tries to convey thought more closely. XX, after whom the book is named, is the spirit of the 20th Century, and so I needed something that suggested the angular geometry of Fortunato Depero or Marinetti.
I created a Futurist-inspired font for the XX passages. Can you tell us about the typefaces you created, especially for the book? We'd love to know what influenced them and how you went about creating them. But there were also passages where I could come up with completely new forms. I used existing fonts to evoke a specific historical era or mimic the design of an old magazine or an existing website. When you can drill right down to the bedrock of design – and type design is the particle physics of graphic design – it's possible to get everything to look exactly how you want it and mould everything to the story's requirements. So I attempted new forms of punctuation, for example, or explored what alien iconography might look like. The palette I used need not just include existing fonts - I could also design new ones to fit the circumstance. How did your background as a type designer inform the creative decisions you made in the book?Īs a type designer, I did have more options. I discovered this recording while searching for other music on my Mac, and though it was recorded on a phone with no purpose in mind, the themes – reincarnation, the wheel of life – were in tune with the novel, so it seemed perfect to incorporate it here.
Side Two of the album is a three-part epic that features the voice of my late father, Alan Hughes, reading a poem. In what may be a first, the review preceded the actual record. Alex Egan of Utter then saw the Bandcamp page and offered to turn it into a real vinyl release – so there is now a beautiful yellow vinyl pressing available, with a bonus 7", also on yellow vinyl, and a print.
#MAKE AVENGERS FONT CODE#
I included a QR code on the novel that takes you to a Bandcamp page where you can listed to it while you read. My sister, a classic pianist, and DJ Food, remixer and musician, then took this review as their brief and actually made the album a reality. I wrote a fictitious review about a fictitious album in my best 'Pretentious NME Music Journalist' style. But they also use it to make art, make music. People then start to explore it, try and decipher it. In the novel the Signal from Space is leaked onto the internet. There's a fictitious music review within its pages. It just took me 25 years to get around to doing it. Different fonts, sizes, layouts could be used to convey character, tone of voice. I'd sometimes use two or more illustrations to show a change, a development between the front and back cover of a CD, for example, but this was a very limited form of narrative.īy analogy, I always thought there could be a form of "narrative design" - that rather than the standard format of the novel, which is usually something like Times, 9pt, set justified, there was a much broader range of possibilities. Because of this, I thought of comics as "narrative illustration" and always wanted to get back to telling a story – to add the dimension of time. What inspired you to create a novel that played with design and typography so much?įor several years after leaving art college, I drew comics for 2000AD (amongst others) before moving into mainstream illustration and design for advertising, book jackets and the like. We chatted to Rian to learn more about this incredible book and how it came to life.
#MAKE AVENGERS FONT SERIES#
Having honed his keen eye for design and storytelling across a career that includes designing the covers for the UK edition of the comic book series Love and Rockets, designing logos for James Bond, the X-Men, Superman, Hed Kandi and The Avengers, and setting up his own type foundry, Device Fonts, his debut novel is a masterpiece of design that's been years in the making. These include newspaper pages, fictional alien languages, Wikipedia entries, and even album covers.Ī feast for the eyes and the imagination, XX brings Rian's varying talents together in groundbreaking fashion. Clocking up at nearly 1,000 pages, it's a sweeping tale told through multiple text formats and layouts. Recently released in paperback, XX is an epic sci-fi thriller that tells the story of humanity's first contact with an alien intelligence via a transmission called the Signal.