Transforming Modern Architect's Works Into 3D Typefaces

Designer Chris Labrooy, inspired by his design heroes; architects Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito, Oscar Niemeyer, Frank Gehry and designer Ettore Sottsass, has created 3D typography based on their works using computer rendering and illustration.

Tadao Ando 3D Type
Typography design based on the architecture of Tadao Ando. Chris chose his favourite Tadoa buildings as a basis for developing these expressive letter forms. Included are: Chikatsu Asuka historical museum / Water temple / Naoshima contemporary art museum annex:





Zaha Hadid 3D Type
Typography design based on the architecture of Zaha Hadid. With this piece, Chris focused on capturing Zaha's formal language rather than reference specific buildings because he claims to be interested in her drawings and paintings from the eighties.:




Oscar Niemeyer 3D Type
Typography design based on the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer. Chris picked his favourite Niemeyer buildings as a basis for developing these expressive letter forms. Included are : Cathedral of Brasília / Niterói Contemporary Art Museum / Ibirapuera Park theatre / Oscar Niemeyer Museum.






Toyo Ito 3d type
Letter forms inspired by Toyo Ito's impressive works. The combination of simple forms with inricate perforations is what excited Chris about Toyo's work. These letters are based on : TOD's omotesando / Tower of winds / Taichung opera house / Mikimoto department store:




Frank Gehry 3d Type
Typography design based on the architecture of Frank Gehry. Chris picked his favourite Gehry buildings as a basis for developing some expressive letter forms. Included are: Guggenheim Bilboa / Aerospace museum / Gehry house / experience music project / dancing house prague:







Although not an architect. Ettore Sottsass' memphis style designs inspired Chris to create a font.

Ettore Sottsass 3d Type
Letter forms inspired by Sottsass's early 80's furniture. This work is Chris' attempt to revisit the past, get inspired, and share with people new and interesting interpretations on familiar historical works:





His Helvetica 3D Type does the opposite of the above works. In this font, Chris has turned a typeface into architecture:




For Bauhaus, Chris took a design style and sensibility and also turned it into a 3d rendering of a building:




Also worth noting is his "Playful Type" made of sex toys:

See more of Chris Labrooy's fabulous work here.

Via Architizer

A Product With Character: Old Sign Letters Are Given New Lights & A New Life.

Character of Finland is a company that rescues old typographic signage from demolition, chooses the most stylish letters and turns them into individual design objects that they offer for sale. After replacing the old neon tubes with LEDs, they add a transformer, install a power cord and give them a new life cycle that you can purchase for yourself.

Some examples of their products:




Numbers, letters and glyphs are amongst their offerings you can buy here



Character Oy
Tel . + 358 9 682 2002
Vuorimiehenkatu 16
00140 Helsinki
Finland

Send E-mails In Your Own Handwriting With Pilot's Online Personal Fontmaker.

Pilot pens has brought the personal touch to impersonal e-mail communication by creating an online site that allows you to personalize a font based on your own handwriting and then use that font to compose and send an e-mail.



You simply go to their website where you register and then print out a blank template. Write your own letters in the spaces in the template and upload it to the site via a scanner, digital camera or webcam. Once the site processes your individual letters of the alphabet, you can finesse each letter by either erasing parts of it or adding to the letter.

Print out the template:

Use a pen [preferably a Pilot pen. After all, this is the way they are marketing their product] to write the characters in your own hand:

Complete the template:


Capture the template by using a web scanner, a digital camera or a webcam and upload it to their site where they will process it. The computer then digitizes your font:

And you can finesse each character if you wish:


Save and then name the font, and voila! You're now ready to send an e-mail [from their site, of course] to anyone with an e-mail address in your own personalized handwritten font.



A video of the process:


Do it here.

Looking for your own font from your handwriting for more than e-mails? Check out fontifier.com, where for $10 you can create your own and download it immediately.

The First 3D Custom Font From Freedom Of Creation

Freedom Of Creation (FOC) has launched the production and distribution of the world's first 3D font and made one further step towards its dream of totally customized industrial production available to a global public.



Kashida-arabic and Kashida-latin are the two versions of the three-dimensional font, developed by Yara Khoury and Melle Hammer in collaboration with FOC and upon invitation by the Khatt foundation for Arabic typography and design research.



With the innovative Kashida-arabic and Kashida-latin 3D fonts, and the Kasheeda online app, the customer can type his personal text, word or acronym on the computer and order his sculptural text directly from the 3D printers of Freedom Of Creation.

This means 100% customization: the very first opportunity to have a standardized basis product personalized to every single one’s needs, fabricated just in time in an industrial way and distributed all over the world.

Customize and order your own 3D text online:
Below is a screen grab of the Arabic interface, followed by a close up of my having typed in my last name, Sweet, along with the price and size for ordering.




The Font

The font is based on the concept of a thin and wide ribbon, bending freely through space. Just from one perspective the text reproduced by the ribbon can be read. All other points of view just offer suggestive visions of a banner floating in the air and bending on the ground in order to create a visually dynamic sculpture.

Cultural content

The new Kashida-arabic and Kashida-latin 3D fonts transform the characteristics of the Arabic and Latin letterforms and invert them. The sloping Arabic letterforms become straight and strict and vice versa, generating a fusion of the two cultural backgrounds. This is enhanced by the fact that in 3D typewriting the result is non directional: neither from left, like Latin writing, neither from right, like Arab writing.

The FOC expertise
Materializing the Kashida-arabic and Kashida-latin 3D fonts as a sculptural object in traditional ways, like bending metal ribbons or similar, would have been artisan work and undergone the influences of the skills of every single craftsman. Choosing the FOC expertise in 3D printing is the will to make the 3D font available at standardized aesthetic and material quality to everybody thanks to rationalizing the production. Letters just will be typed on a computer, which will do the rest about connecting them in a fluid way. After having calculated in order to transform them into a single CAD file, the additive layer manufacturing process can start, the polyamide shape can materialize.




Type out your own in Latin or Arabic and you can order the 3D text in three various sizes and colors here.

images and info courtesy of FOC