The Aerial Bold Project

Aerial Bold : Kickstart the Planetary Search for Letterforms!” is the 11th Kickstarter project that I funded. The project was launched by Benedikt Groß & Joey Lee on October 14, 2014. After two weeks, 100% was funded by 480 bakers. At the end 569 backers pledged 11.492 $ to help bring this project to life.

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, Benedikt Groß and Joey Lee traversed the entire planet’s worth of satellite imagery and developed the tools and methods necessary to map these features hiding in plain sight.

On March 8, 2016, the results were finally presented. The entire letterform database has been made available as a usable dataset for any art – design – science – textual project. Selected letterforms have been converted into a truetype – opentype font format that can be imported into any word processor.

The results of the project are presented at the Aerial Bold Project website. An embedded typewriter allows to enter text with the different fonts :  Satellite, Buildings, Suburbia, Provence. The size, offset, background and location of the fonts can be selected.

Aerial Bold

Aerial Bold Typewriter : Satellite font, Hamburg, size 150, offset 0, red background

Additional information about the process, data, fonts and credits are available at the project website. A catalog and posters complete the documentation. Below are some pictures of my name written with the Aerial Bold fonts.

Aerial Bold Satellite Font

Aerial Bold Satellite Font

Aerial Bold Buildings Font

Aerial Bold Buildings Font

Aerial Bold Suburbia Font

Aerial Bold Suburbia Font

Aerial Bold Provence Font

Aerial Bold Provence Font

TrueType, OpenType, EOT, WOFF and SVG Fonts

Last update : February 20, 2001
TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe’s Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. TrueType offers font developers a high degree of control over precisely how their fonts are displayed, right down to particular pixels, at various font heights.

OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts which is built on TrueType, retaining TrueType’s basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior.

Other font types are :

  • Embedded OpenType (EOT) fonts are a compact form of OpenType fonts designed by Microsoft for use as embedded fonts on web pages. These files usually use the extension “.eot”.
  • Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is a font format, based on the sfnt file structure (used in TrueType and OpenType fonts) and specifically designed for web use with the @font-face declaration. It was developed by Jonathan Kew (Mozilla Corporation), Tal Leming (Type Supply) Erik van Blokland (LettError).
  • SVG Fonts are supported in the W3C spec (http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/fonts.html).

The following links give access to Font libraries :

A @fontface generator is available at the Font Squirrel website. A very useful guide about font embedding has been published by Joshua Johnson on the Six Revisions website. A guide about the Google Font API has been published by Divyang Patel on the same website. How to achieve cross-browser @font-face support is the title of a tutorial published on the website lost in the woods.