Yes, there could soon be a font created solely out of the world’s buildings. We’re not talking turning the Prudential into an I and the Gateway Arch into an O, but actual satellite images of buildings that look like letters. A week ago, “Aerial Bold: Kickstart the Planetary Source for Letterforms” launched on Kickstarter — and immediately grabbed the interest of funders.
In the seven days since its creation, the project already has 389 backers – and, as of right now, has raised $8,280 of its $10,000 goal. That puts the campaign on a trajectory to be successful as of its conclusion on Nov. 13.
The creators are Benedict Gross and Joey Lee. Gross is a computational and speculative designer, and Lee is a geographer who works on data visualization and science communication projects. Both are former MIT research assistants and Boston residents. They’re hoping to combine their talents to use a unique algorithm to comb the satellite images for shapes that look like letters.
According to the Kickstarter page,
Aerial Bold is 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 project wouldn’t only create a typeface — it would create a dataset of letter-like images and where on Earth they come from. Gross and Lee hope that this dataset could be used by artists, citizen scientists and designers for their own datasets and art and design projects.
The problem with the project, and the reason it costs so much to fund, is that the processing of satellite images on a small scale is fairly simple, but such an endeavor on a national or global scale is “paralyzing.” To run their algorithm and find the images they need, Gross and Lee will use the Kickstarter funds to purchase computers and server space.
Contributing to the fund could garner you some pretty cool prizes, from a copy of the font to early access to the dataset to a continental breakfast (Hint: it’s only $10 to get the font). The Kickstarter page also gives dataset and letter examples and explains how the images are found and recorded via a “processing pipeline”.
The explanation – and the whole project – are definitely worth checking out, especially for that subset of font nerds that are probably out there.
If you’re still not sure about it, check out this video from the Kickstarter page:
Image via Google Maps. Video via Vimeo.
