Tag: typefaces

News

New word processor lets you type letters with satellite images

Imagine painstakingly combing through the entirety of Google Maps trying to find buildings, pools, and other structures that resemble letters, then compiling those images together to make new fonts created wholly out of aerial imagery. That’s exactly what creators Benedikt Groß (a computational designer) and Joey Lee (a geographer) did while working on Aerial Bold Typewriter, a new word processor that allows users to easily type full sentences using satellite images of various man-made structures. “Satellite and aerial imagery are rich with stories,” write the duo, explaining how they came up with the idea for the Typewriter. In 2013, they released a…
News

These typewriters will mess with your mind

This is an article about typewriters, but let’s start by discussing the difference between taste and flavour. Taste describes the five senses inside your mouth: sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami. Flavour, on the other hand, connotes a more holistic sensory experience. It combines taste with your sense of smell (more appetizingly known as aroma) to describe much of what you sensed while eating a given meal. People suffering through colds often claim that they cannot taste food when, in fact, the problem is that they have lost their sense of smell. Their tastebuds are largely fine, but the loss of…
News

Digital typeface 83M80 is an attempt to claw back earlier internet eras

These are great times for the weird internet, which is a little strange because it’s all so respectable. Sure, there are still genuinely weird sites like oj.com, but they are weird precisely because they are retro. It’s probably for the best that we don’t live in the era of make-your-own-Geocities and frames, but what have we lost along the way and does it have any aesthetic value independent of our nostalgia?  83M80 — Letterpress in the Digital Era, a documentary by Gonzalo Hergueta and MRKA, attempts to address what has been lost in the move towards a more professionalized internet.…
News

Finally, a typeface for all the words governments never say about surveillance

Surveillance has proven to be good fodder for games. In Touch Tone, a fictional yet fathomable government has deputized its citizenry to spy on their peers by solving puzzles and decoding encryption keys and codes to access private data. Nothing to Hide applies the logic to your every movement. It is a virtual Panopticon that requires your location, likeness, and actions to be visible at all times. Attempts at evasion are futile. Privacy is dead. There are no secrets anymore. These titles use video game mechanics to make the logic of surveillance explicit.  Their metaphors may even be too successful insofar as they…