“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 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 Buildings Font
Aerial Bold Suburbia Font
Aerial Bold Provence Font
