Digital process has often been the enemy of craft. Italy, once the land of highly skilled typographers, calligraphers, and music engravers, has given way to static, boxed-up, boring fonts like the rest of the world. It’s only fitting, then, that some lovers of type and digital media would fight back.
Andren writes in to share his Master Degree Thesis in visual communication design at Politecnico di Milano, an open source investigation of type and process called “A Digital Remake.” The results are simply stunning: drawing upon the 1906 work of Edward Johnston on type, he reconstructs in digital form the process of constructing illuminated type. The translation from traditional media to digital manages to be loving without being slavish: this is truly a digital analog to the original process. Generating random particles and connecting them with beautiful curves, the new type evolves organically, unmistakably digital but rooted in the past.
A Digital Remake Project Page, with open-source code, poster guides to the project in PDFs in English and Italian, and Italian research
EXP Research Team blog
I can’t look at these without getting ideas for animated text. It’s surprising to me, in fact, that text hasn’t inspired more visualist exploration and live VJ sets. Previous font coverage here on CDM:
Free, Open Source, Remixable Fonts, and Embedding Fonts in Flash 9 / AS3
The project was coded in Python using NodeBox, a Mac OS X 2D design tool. The syntax and design concepts are actually not unlike Processing, and I could imagine Processing coders being inspired by the results to think of some analog in that tool, with the added option of 3D. Here’s a brief, oversimplified but hopefully vaguely accurate comparison of the two (I’ve only used Processing, not NodeBox):
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