During a research about Art Nouveau fonts I got attention to Auguste Herbin and his work.

After the wide variety of different styles August Herbin dedicated himself to cubism. His latest work was the “Alphabet Plastique”.

I want to bring the analogue idea of the alphabet in an interactive, digital experience.

Color

Because of the little documentation about the Alphabet Plastique I tried to build a dataset of the digital color tones by myself.

First I translated the french color names into English and matched it automatically with the standard CSS color names. The color names which are not in the CSS color list got added manually.

Shapes

The Shapes are simple SVGs, which I can generate, manipulate and animate.

Notes

To display the notes I used a typeface called MusiQwik by Robert Allgeyer.

With the help of the Tone.js Library I was able to play sounds with a variety of different instruments.

Installation at Waldbaden Festival 2021

I had the chance to install my Alphabet Plastique work at the “Waldbaden Festival” in July 2021. Unfortunately I missed taking proper images/videos, because the festival was so nice. I’m sorry!