Interesting use of variable fonts...

Allan Murray
Allan Murray Posts: 17
in Font Technology

http://www.fastcodesign.com/90167210/helvetica-is-now-an-encryption-device
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Comments

  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 379
    On mobile devices, it’s actually impossible to enter a link except for pasting the raw URL in this form.
  • Allan Murray
    Allan Murray Posts: 17
    I apologise for being 'clumsy' and 'inept' - thought the article may have been of interest here and have seen links posted before to interesting typographic articles. It is not spam.
     
    Any comment on the content? lol
  • Ray Larabie
    Ray Larabie Posts: 1,464
    edited April 2018

    I think it could be useful for tracking printed matter. In Japan, the problem of manga piracy has been in the news lately. Maybe serial information could be encoded in the text somehow to help the police track down scanners. It could be used for additional security for tracking down stolen goods. Thieves know they should grind off serial numbers but what if the serial numbers were encoded in every label?

    @joeclark
    Don't complain about the thread or moderators directly in the thread. That should be done in Suggestions and Bug Reports.

  • Allan Murray
    Allan Murray Posts: 17
    The "tiny changes in the shape of every letter that the human eye can’t detect" look pretty 'detectable' though. 
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,758
    I agree. It looks a bit messed up, like a print driver problem or something. Maybe this could be repurposed as the long-sought-after random feature, to make fonts look hand drawn.
  • joeclark
    joeclark Posts: 122
    Don’t complain about the thread or moderators directly in the thread.

    Does anybody here take orders from Ray Larabie?

  • Johannes Neumeier
    Johannes Neumeier Posts: 398
    If you flip this insight upside down, it is super exciting to see that text appearance is visually resilient and readable enough while still being able to be overloaded with an entire additional layer of encoded digital information. In fact, it seems ironic that the irregularity required for such sophisticated augmentation might actually be pleasing to the eye in the very same way the irregularity of letterpress printed matter now seems visually attractive to us. Or to put it in philosophical hyperbole: The machines yearn irregularity just as much as we do.

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