Alex Taylor

Text Tiles investigates how fibre-based making processes can reinterpret typography, challenging the separation between digital design and traditional craft. Situated within discussions of craft revival, materiality, and experimental typography, the project explores how fibre arts and symbolic letterforms can communicate human experience through handmade objects.

Using a practice-led methodology, grid-based letterforms were sketched digitally and translated into crochet, knitting, weaving, tufting, embroidery, and felting. Iterative cycles of sketching, prototyping, making, and reflection informed the development of each outcome, allowing material characteristics and constraints to shape the final forms.

The findings show how letterforms can exist across digital, physical, and textile modes while remaining recognisable symbols. More than a typographic system, the text tiles function as records of making. Each piece preserves the time, decisions, and movements involved in its creation, leaving a unique trace of the interaction between maker, method, and material.