In an effort to get at the essence of font-design, I averaged all the fonts on my computer and got this:
All the fonts on my computer [image].
I did it in Flash. Originally I was going to use Processing, but its font handling is clunky. (Flash, I later discovered, has its own rendering issues. Next time I’ll try Open Frameworks). Here are two embedded apps that average web-safe fonts:
Sans-serif fonts [flash] Serif fonts [flash]
And here’s the source code:
8 Comments
cool! darn that pesky controversial lowercase ‘g’
this is pure font p0rn
How many fonts does this combine? It doesn’t look like that many. Cool idea though.
Cool idea, although you might want to check out the sans serif set once more.
Flash, if it has a problem rendering a font, will render it as Times. Unfortunately, there is no way (as far as I could tell) in AS3 to see if flash can’t load a font. So, if flash can’t access one of the web-safe sans-serif fonts on your computer, it throws a Times font in there.
If anyone knows a way of detecting if a font isn’t loading, please let me know. To figure out which fonts on my machine wouldn’t load, I wrote a routine that compared the bitmap of the letter “A” in each font to a bitmap of the letter “A” rendered as Times. This seemed like a very hacky fix, but I couldn’t find simpler way of doing it.
Sam, there are 492 fonts in the first example. It would have been more, but some fonts (like futura???) won’t load in AS3 (see my previous comment).
is it bad that I want this rendered as an actual font
great post, thank you for sharing.
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