These Two Guys Want to Turn The Entire Planet Into a Typeface

Last we checked in with Benedikt Groß and Joey Lee, the designer and geographer had just finished counting the number of pools in LA (43,123). Now the duo hope to bring their somewhat-insane methodology to a similarly perplexing challenge: How do we find all the buildings on the planet that look like letters from the air?

Aerial Bold would be a brand-new typeface made from the best possible buildings-as-letterforms on the planet, as well as a dataset including all the buildings-as-letterforms on the entire Earth. The project would be designed and built using some exceptionally creative data-mining techniques, resulting in datasets that can be used for art, design, or science. By contributing to their Kickstarter campaign, you get access to their process. Also, their Kickstarter video is very funny.

You'll remember Groß and Lee's project wrote about their data-collecting process, an ambitious hodgepodge of satellite mapping, Mechanical Turk, clipping farms in India that took a year.

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Aerial Bold is even, um, bolder, according to Lee, mostly because a big part of this project is making all the data public. "After the feedback from the Atlas we had a growing realization that normal people—artists, designers, citizen scientists—increasingly wanted to have ways to find features in aerial imagery," he says. "We thought, why not do something to explicitly show the process of making your own data, and on a large scale with open source tools?"