I read the first paragraph and rolled my eyes, then proceeded down to the photos and specimen and fell in love with it. Amazing find
Yeah it sounds like bullshit pretentious art (technology, nature, synergy ) but the results are actually really cool.
Yes, I was thinking "W@nker!" ... scrolled down and then went "Wow .. that is seriously cool". Can't imagine that it will be much use past Year 5, but it's a great concept.
I dunno, it seems kind of... Smudged? Totally subjective, of course, but it just doesn't seem that interesting.
Doesn't look too different than the plethora of silly/fun/slightly-illegible fonts available on the interwebs
It’s more organic than most available fonts. It gets smudgy, but Year 1 is widely usable and Years 2 through 4 will have their places.
I think something between Year 1 and Year 2 would be an interesting addition.
I think we'll get Comic Sans in another year.
Papyrus on papyrus, by excimer laser.
I'd like to see it in other tree specimens. Each one will create its own unique design
Exact same reaction.
That is one of the most unique mergers of tech and art I have seen in a while. Big ups to the creator.
> Chapter two, Deep Occlusion, explores the typeface as a dataset for an AI to learn how a tree grows and designs shapes over time.
Very curious to see this part emerge.
Fuck that! It will put trees out of a job!
What is the font of the site itself? I really like it - on mobile right now so can't open devtools to find out myself
I can't help reading the progressions of letters as being what the tree would say, if it could, after having letters carved in it.
> aaaaa!
> fffff!
> hhhhh...
I love this project! But I feel like the attention to details in planning the project is not matched with the attention to details when it comes to capturing the essence / energy of the font as the tree progressed. Some examples are "a" for year 3 and "h" for both year 2 and 3 where the font is lacking a lot of the expression that the designer tree is providing.
But very interesting. Thank you for creating this.
I wonder, can you turn this into a "tree aging" machine learning model that can then predict / apply this to other characters, for example those Google monocolor emojis.
This is literally what “Chapter 2” in the article is about.
If I understand it correctly, it’s based on a single tree, though - so not exactly big data across many specimens and types of trees.
The font is hard to read. It's a nice thoughtful project but seems to not have 'worked' as a functional font. But if I see it used on a blog somewhere now I'll probably remember it and have a chuckle.
There are thousands upon thousands of fonts that are also “hard to read”. It’s not because they are poorly executed. They’re just not all meant to be used as body text for a book. The function is clearly display text (ie one-off headlines, big type for designs like you might see in a magazine) and this one works in that role perfectly. Almost any amount of “hard to read” is tolerable when there’s only one or two lines of text set in it and it also happens to look beautiful.
Tolerable is a synonym of sufferable. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Beauty is not always about function and text is not always about content. Design and style can communicate a certain vibe or appeal to a certain social group, which might be more important than raw information.
I don't think they intended for the tree to make an easy to read font. It looks like it "worked" very well as a cool art experiment to me.
I think the actual pictures of the tree worked out quite well, just not the vectors.