You know how you can sometimes see other shapes in objects, the way a cloud looks like a giant slice of pizza or the cracks in the sidewalk form the shape of a giraffe or something? Well, two people are now trying to make something font-tastic out of the shapes we see on the Earth's surface.
Designer Benedikt Groß and geographer Joey Lee are on a mission to find all of the letterforms, or alphabet shapes, found in the topology of buildings, roads, rivers, trees and lakes on Earth. They're hoping to make the first typeface out of objects on Earth, which is going to have the clever name of "Aerial Bold." "Cosmic Sans" would have been a good name too, I'm just saying.
The duo will accomplish this by combing through all of the satellite imagery of the earth available using the open-source map OpenStreetMap, which is vector-based, unlike Google Maps or Bing, which are image-based, according to Gizmodo. This will allow them to more easily search for the alphabet around the world.
The goal of this project is to make this letterform database available as a dataset that anyone can use for their own art or design projects. Groß and Lee plan to also make the source code available so that people can use it for other geography-based ideas, such as locating buildings or mapping fire hydrants.
The duo recently launched a Kickstarter campaign for the project that, on its first day, earned $341 of their $10,000 goal. Though it might not seem like it would take much money to get this project off the ground at first glance, Groß and Lee say they will use the Kickstarter funds to buy computing and server space for their algorithm so it can be available for anyone with an Internet connection to use.
This isn't the first time Groß and Lee have teamed up to take on the globe. Last year, they published The Big Atlas of LA Pools, which includes 74 volumes on, you guessed it, pools in Los Angeles. Each book includes all of the illustrations, satellite images and information on pools you would ever want.
As Gizmodo points out, this isn't the first time someone has decided to turn satellite images of the Earth into font, but Aerial Bold will be different in that each letterform will be geotagged with specific locations, which the creators hope will become mashups of different places with Aerial Bold's region-specific typefaces. Ah, bringing the world together, one letter at a time.
