Tetromino

DATE	January 2025
INSPIRATION	Tetrominoes (via this Tumblr ask)

I was asked to try making a script out of tetrominoes (the little shapes from Tetris) and pulled this together over a cup of tea! It was fun, I'd love more suggestions like this. Here are a couple of sentences:

These say "hello my name is eve greenwood. enjoy the new script."

So there are 7 tetromino shapes and 7 colours:

The different shapes can be rotated to create new glyphs, giving us a maximum of 19 different shapes to play with. However I'm going to exclude the sideways I tetromino because it's too long and doesn't result in nice condensed words. With 18 glyphs, some letters have to pair up:

Let's say the script acts the same way as Tetris; letters fall from the top down and your job is to stack them into words. To make it easier to read, letters are coloured depending on the order they fall in, using the number order I gave above. The goal of a scribe is to stack letters as tall and as neatly as possible while also trying to get as many neighbours as possible. If a falling letter can be stacked in a way that technically puts it lower than a preceding letter, that's fine - the colour order makes it clear what the word is anyway.

Ideally a word wouldn't span more than 4 blocks wide, though if it's the last word in a sentence or an especially long word this is forgivable. Since there are only 7 colours, longer words just loop colours.

The first letter of a word always has to start on the baseline and words are read and stacked left to right. New rows or sentences start on the lowest possible baseline without overlapping the row below it. Here's a breakdown of those sentences I posted at the start:

I just used the English alphabet for this, but a potential improvement could be changing this script to be a syllabary instead. Each shape could be a specific consonant and its rotation conveys its vowel...? Much to think about...