title
Cody
Artist/Designer
Barry Spencer
Date
2010
type of writing system
Alphabet, Cipher
Based on
Latin script
References
Morse Code, Maritime flags, Braille
The design concept for Cody was born from a casual encounter with a videogame that featured an environmental puzzle. The font’s creation process, akin to the translation and decipherment of several ciphers, relies on the order of the letters in the English alphabet. Each character within Cody is comprised of three concentric, incomplete circles. These circles, starting from the innermost, rotates 45 degrees clockwise as the letter sequence progresses. Once the first circle completes a full rotation, the next one takes its turn, and so on. Drawing influences from various sources, such as Morse Code, maritime flags, and Braille, Cody marks the inception of the designer’s journey into enigmatic scripts. The project was accompanied by Speculatype (2017), a book that presents the designer’stypographic explorations with Latin letterforms, offering in-depth case studies and information about the inspiration and process behind them.