Hairy Type & others
JA
October 11
There are, as always, some very brilliant things going on with typography and the web at the moment. Here are just a brief handful:
1. Hairy Type
Designer Chris Davenport created this crazy font, which basically makes your words look the feral kid brother of Grug, using Nodebox (a kind of ‘digital sketchbook’).
I was playing around with the different libraries and managed to combine a colour library that creates realistic colour palettes from one hex value and a library that allows you to import .svg images to manipulate with code. I combined this with a snippet of code I found in the gallery section. There are variables that effect how the hair grows so I substituted a few of them with max and min values to create sliders so people can grab the code and have a play.
In the spirit of open sourcing, Davenport has made the code available to anyone, so if you’re interested in growing your own ‘hairy type’, you can do so here. Davenport used the font to create this t-shirt.
2. Light Calligraphy
Julien Breton, aka Kalaam, is an artist from Nantes who does some amazing work in ‘light calligraphy’ using high-powered lamps and time-lapse photography. He started out in 2001 by imitating the work of contemporary Arabic calligraphers such as Hassan Massoudy, Salah Moussawy and Lassaâd Métoui, but was worried about making mistakes given that he couldn’t speak the language. So instead, (while taking Arabic lessons) Breton invented his own Latin-based alphabet, drawing heavily Middle-Eastern, Chinese and Japanese styles.
In an interview with Ziggy Nixon, Breton explained his process as this:
Light calligraphy is a creation completed with bright lights that involves taking a picture over a ‘long’ space of time with a camera. The end result appears only when the photograph is developed… [W]orking with light calligraphy can take different forms: the one I practice most often is the creation of calligraphic light pieces in the outdoors… When I work alone, I’ll have to place the camera, manage the set-up and ensure the technical settings are right. Then I begin working on the ‘choreography’ part of this type of calligraphy. In all cases, I have tested the forms and gestures many, many times over. It is this kind of practice and repetition which allows me to make successive refinements in the calligraphy itself.
Have a look at more of Breton’s amazing work on his flickr stream.
3. Sand Calligraphy
And finally, here is some beautiful calligraphy from Andrew van der Merwe, an artist from Cape Town. He began ‘scratching with sticks’ but found that this made ‘more of a mess than a mark’. He then began developing other instruments that would allow for cleaner lines, aiming for ‘a kind of scoop which leaves neat V-cut letters of the sort one gets in stone carving’.
As a calligrapher I have a particular interest in African colonial and pre-colonial writing systems, so when I doodle on the beach its often along these lines. The more angular letter styles take their inspiration from Tifinagh, the script of the Tuareg people of North Africa. It is interesting how that, even to this day, the Tifinagh resembles ancient Greek and Phoenician.
For more, have a look at his portfolio on the Behance network.
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Comments
11 Oct 09 at 8:42
Font play is cool, has been for centuries. Have you seen Kiersty Boon's groundbreaking book of poetry which uses all sorts of font play devices?
...11 Oct 09 at 10:35
No I haven't. Is there a site somewhere abouts? Will keep an eye out for it next time I'm bookshopping....
...12 Oct 09 at 8:21
It's available online at Amazon, etc. If you google "The Poet Busker" by Kiersty Boon, you'll find a copy available for instant purchase. It is sensational, my favourite poetry book.
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