A meeting of Byzantine and Art Deco forms, Aphasia began as a series of handwritten captions to accompany drawings in the early 1990s. The drawings were abandoned to allow the lettering to become the real composition. Playfully set in blocks of verse with each line shaped through free-association, the only visual rule was that all the lines of capitals be of equal length. The challenge of the game required extensive abbreviations, ligatures, small caps, and superiors. With the advent of Letraset’s FontStudio program, the project moved into the typographic realm.