What the font?

July 27, 2007 11:52 AM

I'm looking for a website that had users draw each letter of the alphabet with their mouse and then overlaid each drawing of a given letter on one another to create an "average" typeface that looked remarkably crisp and professional. What was the site?

I'm pretty sure the site in question was put together as part of a student's research project, and I think it was featured either on Metafilter or Coudal, but I haven't been able to find it via Google.

Does anyone else recall this remarkable website?

posted by jacob to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I think you mean BitFontMaker, described here on Lifehacker. I can't get the actual application to come up for me, though, so it may be down.
posted by cerebus19 at 11:58 AM on July 27, 2007

If you're looking for something similar, there's Fontifier which has you scan in your own handwriting (so you're writing as you normally would, instead of with a mouse). But it costs money for the results (albeit not much).
posted by cerebus19 at 12:00 PM on July 27, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks for the answer, crebus19, but that's not the site I'm looking for I'm afraid. The one I'm after doesn't have so much to do with creating a usable handwritten font, but rather it deals with the idea that by averaging a number of people's ideas with how a letter should be drawn, a "correct" font can be created. That is, even with people drawing their Zs with a horizontal line through the middle, because most people don't do this, the final font will look like a crisp Z without the line.
posted by jacob at 12:05 PM on July 27, 2007

Best answer: Was it The Collective Type Project?
posted by iconomy at 12:19 PM on July 27, 2007 [3 favorites]

I see on preview that iconomy's found it, but I've written this so I'll throw it in anyhow: a similar project at Typophile let each visitor change a single pixel in a letter, so that the resulting letters were more a collaborative project than an average. It was here but it seems to be done now. Here's the final results, and here's a similar project and another that uses larger, full-color images, but neither of those is about type.
posted by mendel at 12:24 PM on July 27, 2007

Does this sound like it?

"Should the orange pixel be white or black? The Smaller Picture at Typophile is a truly collaborative experiment where users participate in the real-time growth of a bitmap alphabet."

- from this page at Coudal. But the link's dead and not available from the wayback machine.

Or, what mendel said....
posted by iconomy at 12:28 PM on July 27, 2007

Ooops.....this page at Coudal.
posted by iconomy at 12:29 PM on July 27, 2007

Response by poster: Yep, iconomy's got it. Thanks everybody--those are all some great links!
posted by jacob at 2:53 PM on July 28, 2007