June 17, 2018

This slab H sprouts serifs until it no longer can

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 10:23 am

Typographer Just van Rossum used his brother Guido’s programming language Python to create a capital letter H in which each serif (the dangly bits at the ends of the stems) sprouts its own serifs, creating a recursive H in the process.

Typotheque in The Hague made a limited edition poster of this design:

Slab serif typefaces are characterised by angular terminations at the end of strokes. Just van Rossum designed this ultimate Slab Serif capital H, with an ever-expanding number of serifs. Each H has four serifs, each of which becomes an H by sprouting additional serifs.The serifs on those serifs sprout their own serifs, on and on and on up to the thinnest line that offset press technology can handle.

See also: Geeked out coin wins design comp for another example of Python-based algorithmic art.

(Photo: Typotheque)

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November 1, 2008

Geeked out coin wins design comp

Filed under: Architecture,Design,Dutch first by Branko Collin @ 4:18 pm

Stani Michiels, artist by day and Python hacker by night, created a five euro coin using only free software for a design competion issued by the Dutch mint, and won. The coin, commemorating a rich Dutch architectural tradition, should be available nowish.

The coin’s obverse consists of a portrait of the queen made up out of the names of famous architects, and the reverse displays an outline of the country that doubles as a skyline made by positioning architecture books in a circle.

Michiels — a Belgian responsible for SPE-IDE, a Python IDE, and Phatch, a photo editor — outlines all the little design details in a long blog post, including the software he used (Python, of course) and the calculations and Google search results that went into this design. Unfortunately the mint would not allow Michiels to release the designs under the GPL license.

The Netherlands has a long tradition of meaningful and elaborately designed money, as we touched upon earlier.

Via LWN.net.

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