A font is designed to have certain attributes (e.g. harmony between the letters). It is not clear that this harmony is preserved if you distort the font algorithmically. For this font the designer ensured that it is preserved.
I get that part (I've designed commercial typefaces), but as I understand it, (1) this only works for type on circles or circular arcs, and (2) the typeface has no awareness of the circle/segment it's on, so the designer still has to manually match the Curve property to the radius.
I think this is really cool and interesting work by Nick Sherman. I just wonder if I'm correct about the limited applications, and what could be done to enable the kind of "contextual intelligence" that would enable fonts to better optimize themselves for a broader set of types of envelope deformations.
I especially like 'Quantum Mechanics and Experience' by David Z Albert (he's got a very peculiar style of writing that I enjoy), and 'Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity' by Tim Maudlin.
Not easy reading, but manageable if you have a physics degree.
I tried it and it works. The animation uses belts that are very flexible. With a real belt I needed to give it a shake to make it untwist itself, but it does work.
It is indeed easy to twist the belt until you have the hang of it.
I think the animation is a bit deceptive because even with elastic bands you'd have to provide some way for the correct untwisting to occur. In the animation it happens 'automagically'.
Original source, I imagine, would be very tersely commented, if only to fit in memory / floppy, and would have very short variable and subroutine names, and lots of mess and commented-out lines from experiments.
I know it’s going to come off as a swiss mechanical watch snob, but I am disappointed that Omega allowed swatch to clone their work of art timepieces in what are essentially plastic quartz frauds. It’s the opposite of what a high end luxury brand does. You think we’ve ever see Rolex make $500 plastic quartz watches? I think not.
