Hasta La Ideas

L: ABC Dataset Samples; R: Photo credit: NOAA, Vancouver Aquarium.

We’ve long been enamored with the Eames’ Powers of Ten short film, which is as much an introduction to aerial photography as it is to the math behind astronomy and biology. Just as everyone now takes beautiful images (and the retina displays to view them on) for granted, there is also a sense in which we are collectively GPS-enabled: After all, digital cartography is perhaps the most practical application of constant connectivity, and we can thank one company for the ability to zoom out to god’s-(or satellites’-)eye view with a pinch of the fingers.

Benedikt Groß & Joey Lee take it even further (if not farther) with Aerial Bold, the “first map and typeface of the earth.”

The project is literally about “reading” the earth for letterforms, or alphabet shapes, “written” into the topology of buildings, roads, rivers, trees, and lakes. To do this, we will traverse the entire planet’s worth of satellite imagery and develop the tools and methods necessary to map these features hiding in plain sight.

The entire letterform database will be made available as a “usable” dataset for any of your art/design/science/textual projects and selected letterforms will be made into a truetype/opentype font format that can be imported to your favorite word processor.

(more…)