The shapes of buildings and the Earth become a font for two university students. Aerial Bold is an alphabet of nature and architecture for “reading” our planet from above.
Two researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Mit) are set to bring a new font to computers everywhere. Already the authors of The big atlas of LA pools, German Benedikt Groß and American Joey Lee are trying to raise the funds needed to create a new typeface: a natural alphabet made up of buildings and landscapes photographed from a satellite.
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Helvetica, Arial, Times New Roman and Verdana are just some of the fonts — the typefaces — used to write text on a computer. As soon as Benedikt Groß and Joseph Lee reach $10,000 in funding on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding site for creative projects, the new typeface, to be called Aerial Bold, will be ready for release. The font created by Groß and Lee, currently consisting of uppercase characters only, is essentially a series of satellite photographs taken of residential complexes, industrial sheds, warehouses and buildings with a rather distinctive shape — that of a letter of the alphabet.
The project is far more ambitious than that, however, and also involves the development of a new satellite mapping system for our planet, through which anyone will be able to explore geographical data in search of new letters. This is possible because the fonts are nothing more than images of reality captured by satellite and stored in a database usable on any computer.
From geography to the shape of the city, words will be able to be written in the language of the Earth — through building typologies, roads, rivers and trees. From topography to typography is a short step; you only need to look at the maps.
