Emotional Gamut visualizes the complex interconnections of our emotional experiences. The project presents visual analogies for the seven primary emotions, each having a palette of colors, unique shapes and typography. The project comes together as a visual system that helps express varying emotional experiences. Using the tools of graphic design to convey emotion the project turns intangible feelings into a tangible sign system.
Emotional Gamut
Akshita Chandra
Visual form analogies for each of the seven emotions
Visual type analogies for each of the seven emotions overlapping each other
Dimensional and tactile typography for love
Dimensional and tactile typography for surprise
Dimensional and tactile typography for anger
The system is employed to express various different emotional experiences using tools like superimposition and variability. These compositions present a nice way to collapse the complexity of each experience down to a meaningful and digestible scale, while revealing it's subjectivity, multiplicity and layeredness.
The logic of the system was built to reflect the variability in size, intensity and proportion of each emotion.
The emotions and the experiences were also extended as tactile sculptures. The idea of physicality and tactility was inspired by the fact that emotions are so physical themselves.
Acrylic was chosen as the material since it affords transparency and overlaps which was already baked into the project.
Different transparency points to how heavy an emotion feels. Fear is completely opaque, anger is translucent and others are tinted and see-through.
Tactile sculpture for ‘Textual Dread’
Tactile sculpture for ‘Hommeriment’
Tactile sculpture for ‘Doglessness’
Adding dynamism and movement to each of the emotions.
The system extends in various mediums and techniques that affords transparency and overlaps. RISO cards printed for the MICA GDMFA family
Cover for the Emotional Gamut Thesis book
