November 2020 – January 2021
desenha‑me um poema. was a platform that allowed the creation of visual poetry by multiple people simultaneously through an ever changing cybertext. The platform aimed to promote an explorative and ephemeral experience.
Communication Design Bachelor Degree, Faculty of Fine Arts University of Porto
From a static initial poem, users could change the position and the opacity of each word and punctuation, as well as rotate them.
Each element of the original poem could only be manipulated once in each new creation. When there weren’t any more words or punctuations left to be used, the created visual poetry would move to the left square leaving the right square blank.
In this now empty space the creation of a new visual poetry can take place.
This platform is designed to encourage users to explore and experiment. Its interface intentionally avoids clarity in interaction, fostering a sense of discovery. There are three unlabeled controls, each with the same visual design, yet each one triggers a different effect: one adjusts the size of the words, another alters their opacity, and the last rotates them.
To ensure the legibility of the poetry, we’ve implemented limits on the extent of these changes. For example, users cannot reduce the opacity to 0, as this would render the text invisible and hinder the process of creating new visual poetry.
The main goal of the project was to allow the creation of visual poetry by multiple people at the same time. Therefore it was necessary to deploy it through a node.js server to keep the construction in process updated in real time.
Since the project aimed to promote an experimental experience and not the production of a final artifact, the different visual poetries created weren’t saved, having an ephemeral existence. The following examples were retrieved by visiting the website and manually collecting them.
