This beauty, found in a random dump of Internet Archive books: a set of practice texts for (I think) reading shorthand, this one from 1851. Like alien language mixed with steampunk curly lettering.
Cover from “Beginner’s Basic”
Can’t get enough of this cover from Beginner’s BASIC, from 1979.
Sub-Atomic Scale Letters
Letters drawn at sub-atomic scale by researchers Hari Manoharan, Laila Mattos, and Chris Moon – carbon monoxide atoms placed carefully on a copper substrate, whose interference patterns resolve into letters. A very cool addition: the letters S and U (for Stanford University, where the research took place) are actually encoded on top of each other.
See this NSF page for a video explaining the process in detail.
“General Shop For Everyone” Cover
The cover from the 1959 book “General Shop For Everyone”. Totally love the color and typography.
Pica Ruler/Slim Jim
An antique typographer’s pica ruler, found converted to a slim jim. Via: Stumptown Printers.
Colorful Spam
DNA Font
Font created from single strands of DNA, created by Harvard post-doc Bryan Wei, and colleagues Mingjie Dai and Peng Yin.
Via: Nature (via Alex Myers)
Horizontal/Vertical Letterform Interpolation
Yet more letterform interpolations – these done in Processing both horizontally and vertically between the letters from the standard alphabet and their counterpart in an alphabet sorted by frequency in modern text (for example, ‘a’ is interpolated with the most common letter, ‘e’). From left to right, the original letter, both capitalized, original capitalized, frequency letter capitalized, both lowercase (ie: A/E, A/e, a/E, a/e).
[ click on image for (very large) full-sized version with all letters ]
W > x
Further letterform interpolation.
Diter Roth – “Some Variations”
In the book “An Anthology of Concrete Poetry” mentioned in the previous post, I found this wonderful little piece by Diter Roth. The title is actually “Some variations on 44” but I can’t figure out how to get that to show up in the title.
I’ve uploaded a full-size scan – click on the image to view it. Detail below:
