Anatomy Assignment

I fell in love with a typeface called Futura. Unfortunately, Futura will never love me back. Oh well.

Futura was so geometric looking that I couldn't help but wonder if there was some sort of mathemagical formula behind its simplicity. Perhaps it could be the secret recipe behind why everything today looks so modern. Consider how Mies Van Der Rohe based the IIT Campus off the Golden Ratio and Fibonnaci numbers, how Pierre Bezier used Bezier curves to design cars in the 60s and how the Greeks used triangles on the Parthenon.

To explore this, I wrote a program to draw infinitely long lines from every edge of every letter in Futura. I was hoping there would be similarities in the way the lines intersected based on the kerning, the font size, the stroke width, the ascender and descenders and every other possible property of type. Unfortunately, I spent the weekend on it and it wound up looking like a pile of complex crap as you can see in the attached picture.

For me, Futura makes me think of the warm, loving American nationalism of Jamison Handy Pictures and Ford Automobiles, the progress in humanity achieved by the Bauhaus, the firm industriousness of Chicago's practicalness, and the rambunctious innocence of the DaDas and Futurists.

I could care less about Serif fonts. In fact, the only one I really like is Cooper Black. When I'm looking at Cooper Black, I'm looking through a window at a face that's beyond the processes of cynicism and enlightenment, bliss and rejection, assertiveness and anxiety, doubt and self confidence. It is a face that has achieved something called Simplicity.

I'm simply not open yet to seeing why Serif fonts are beautiful. When I am ready, I will stop looking through the window and walk through the door.

-Sean Neilan