Made Us Look: Typography Made from Aerial Images
It’s time to celebrate, typeface nerds, because there’s a new font in town. It may not be one that you can necessarily type your term papers in, but it’s definitely one worth talking about. Say hello to Aerial Bold, the world’s first accidental typeface.
Aerial Bold — not to be confused with Arial Bold — is made up entirely of “letters” found in satellite images. You know when you look at Google Earth and see that building that looks like a “B” or that river that looks like an “S”? That’s Aerial Bold, friends.
MIT alumni Joey Lee and Benedikt Groß started this ambitious typography project by creating algorithms that scan the world’s satellite data for features that resemble letters. But it isn’t designed just for creative fulfillment. Lee and Groß say that the algorithms and technology that they’re perfecting could be used for other projects in the future, essentially allowing mankind to automatically scan satellite imagery for patterns and create a new type of mapping.
While they’ve already found each of the 26 letters of the alphabet, the designers have a bigger picture in mind. Aerial Bold will be a searchable database of everything in the world that looks like letters from an aerial view. So in the end, there could potentially be hundreds of As to choose from, one seen in France, one in Mexico and one found in Dubai. Because of the worldly size of this project, Lee and Groß created a Kickstarter to get some help.
Once completed, the database will be available for purchase, and selected letterforms will be made into a font format that you can, in fact, write your term papers in.
Are you loving the idea behind Aerial Bold as much as we are? Sound off below!
(h/t: Fast Company)