Logbook 2026-10-17

Past midnight, right after “Relevé”, I took a different turn: no more elk. I wanted to work with rectangular shapes that can hold symbols, starting from a page of my notebook where I had sketched them with two pieces only, a square and a vertical bar.

These blocks were meant to do three jobs: spell my initials, act as a mascot for thinking states by moving or animating their fine lines, and serve as building blocks for patterns, filled with solid colour, shapes, line patterns or glyphs. That style of shapes and glyphs is inspired by a mix of several ASCII pieces among my references. In the sketch the blocks were far apart. I preferred them compact, close together.

The result, “Blocs”, had an EL monogram and a mascot made of the E lying on its side. Seeing it, I narrowed things down again. Forget the initials. Leave the mascot and its states aside for now. Focus on interface elements and on animated illustrations built from the symbols. Drop the triangle and quarter-circle symbols. Use real glyphs from a monospaced typeface instead of drawn ones. And for the pattern generator, represent objects, drawn in that same style of shapes and glyphs.

What came back is the direction I’m still in. A set of square cells: solid, checkered, hatched, outlined, or holding a mono glyph. A small tool that draws objects with them, a cup of coffee, a bird, a plant, and animates them: they can build up, or stay alive with steam and leaves moving. And first interface pieces made of the same cells.