While I am not a typographer per se, I do like a good font. I also really like cool technology to do image analysis, so when a project comes along the merges both, I have to gush a bit.
This recently funded kickstarter project aims to take satellite imagery and find shapes that look like letters and create a font set from it:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/357538735/aerial-bold-kickstart-the-planetary-search-for-let
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, we will traverse the entire planet’s worth of satellite imagery and develop the tools and methods necessary to map these features hiding in plain sight.
