Gallery: An Ingenious New Typeface Inspired by Old Maps, But Made With Algorithms
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Jonathan Hoefler—one of the best known typographers out there—has designed a new typeface: Obsidian. The 3-D, ornamental font harks back to the days of copper plate engraving, but it's absolutely a product of computers and algorithms.
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"We had the idea of doing a typeface inspired by these kinds of exuberant ornamented things that you see on old maps," Hoefler says. But, “how can you do a typeface that is ornamented and exuberant, that still feels current?”
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An ornamental font like this could take over a year to get right. So Hoefler and senior designer Andy Clymer solved for this by creating custom algorithms that could help. Obsidian is created in a virtual environment that can simulate light falling on any 3-D character in the set, thus eliminating the need to draw tens of thousands of shadows, one by one.
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These two ampersands show two distinct ways that letters can be illuminated—an option that would have painstaking to produce without Hoefler and Clymer's new digital tools.
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All typefaces are created in type design software, where letters and numbers show up as coordinates that can be tweaked in infinitesimal ways.
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That challenges becomes multiplied for ornamental types. The more ornate the character, the more plot coordinates exist.
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As much as Obsidian was inspired by Victorian-era letters, it's a product of the digital age. It doesn’t have hand-shaded gradients indicating a third dimension; it has carefully placed pixels.
