Gallery: A Font Made Entirely of Satellite Imagery of Buildings
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Once completed, Aerial Bold will be a typeface created from shapes and patterns from the planet’s topology.
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The new font came to be because Benedikt Gross, a data visualization designer, and Joey Lee, a geographer, spend so much time looking at satellite images, they eventually started noticing letters in them.
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Once they saw a few letters, “suddenly letters were all over the place,” Gross says.
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In order to turn “topography into typology,” they synthesize satellite imagery and prep it so an algorithm can read it, by cranking up the contrast and blocking out distinct shapes in red.
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Gross says that letters made mostly of right angles, like I and H, have shown up most frequently.
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Gross and Lee hope to someday create more specific type sets, like an entire font for Germany's topography.
