We use an analog approach to visually present the image of Wieden+Kennedy Shanghai in the crazily digitalized environment of China. We choose a hacked typewriter to imply the provocative creativeness of Wieden+Kennedy’s culture stands, and turn people’s stories and their words into portraits.

And based on the implication and systematic usage of characters, we used strategic wordplay for the Chinese translation of Typeself. “???” is the Chinese word for “typewriter”. However, using similar pronunciation but different characters, “???” actually works to define our new visual system, literally translating to “hit myself” - exactly how we used our machine: by hitting the letters to create portraits of one’s self.

The Typeself machine and the program will then self-generate a new typeself profile for each new employee who joins the WK Shanghai Office to keep the profile wall always updated.

The making of Typeself involved tearing up, decoding, and hacking five typewriters to lead the words to deconstruction. We explored their different system fonts by scanning and dividing the characters to finally pick one as our original font model. We then programmed these individual elements to allow the machine to automatically type the characters, using them as the brushstrokes to create the unique combinations that form the portraits.

In more than 300 hours, we witnessed how the complexity and the simplicity of our words and their characters form our images. Typeself has been a philosophical journey that makes us realize that, maybe after all, in this compacted world, we are all just simple characters being put together.