Stochastic

Stochastic is a font of ‘digital fleurons’ or ornaments, derived from experiments with custom-made vector ‘brushes’ in Adobe illustrator which led to some unexpected and serendipitous outcomes. It occurred to me that these ‘structured accidents’ might be developed to address a question that has preoccupied me for some time: the problem of developing languages of decoration and ornament that are integral to digital practice, 

Fleurons are typographic ornaments traditionally used by letterpress printers to create borders, rules, paragraph breaks or whole fields of repeat pattern. They are also known as ‘printers’ flowers’ and are normally floral in origin (the writer Robert Bringhurst refers to them as ‘horticultural dingbats’).

With very few exceptions, fleurons created during the digital era have simply been adaptations of long-established traditional forms.