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In Pictures: The 3-D Typeface Alphabet

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Design consultants Johnson Banks and digital media school Ravensbourne have created Arkitypo, a 3-D alphabet in which each letter explores the history of a particular typeface. The project makes use of the Ravensbourne school’s 3-D prototype printer, which makes it possible to “print out” a physical 3-D object based on digital blueprints. Pretty alphabet is pretty…

The ‘A’ is inspired by Akzidenz Grotesk, an early forerunner to Helvetica and part of a family of early sans-serifs called ‘grotesques’.

‘B’ is modeled on Bodoni, created by Giambattista Bodoni.

Courier was originally commissioned for 1950s IBM typewriters, but soon became the standard font throughout the then-emerging industry. As a nod to the torturous days of jammed machinery, this ‘C’ is built from a small forest of typewriter keys.

Engravers, typical of a tyle of font originally designed for engraving into metals.

Fraktur, a classic ‘blackletter’ style of font, is umbilically linked to Germany’s history, being the predominant style for centuries in pre-war Germany. For most of the 20th century it proved controversial, eventually being banned by the Nazis in 1941.

This is the famous lowercase ‘g’ from Eric Gill’s 1933 Gill Sans typeface. He is quoted as saying, “A pair of spectacles is rather like a ‘g’; I will make a ‘g’ rather like a pair of spectacles.”

Released in 1927, Kabel was a geometric sans-serif typeface that was named in honour of the then newly completed transatlantic telephone cable.

The infamous ITC typeface of the seventies Machine took its inspiration from the American Midwest a century before. Now a classically brutal font perfect for all things industrial, it is interpreted here with a system of interlocking cogs.

Retina began as a typeface for the sections of the The Wall Street Journal printed in very small sizes. At large sizes it seems to feature crude ‘notches’ cut into the letter forms but these are there to compensate for the way blobs of ink blur type at tiny sizes.

Trajan was a 1989 adaptation of the famous Roman capitals inscribed on the base of Trajan’s Column in Rome. These letter forms have been influential for centuries, but this was the first design to directly emulate the carvings. The column itself can be climbed via an internal spiral staircase.

Click here to view the embedded video.

View the full alphabet here. All images © Johnson Banks.


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