While writing about how thrifty you can be when you make letters out of pixels, I thought of the final alphabet offered in my Calligraphy Alphabets Made Easy, Putnam/Perigee, 1986, ISBN 0-399-51257-8, a book of 366 alphabets for every day of the year.
The letters of this alphabet are made out of coarser and coarser grids, starting with an A that is 26 x 26 [that is, 676 dpi] and ending up with a Z made of a single diagonal slash. While the high-res letters express their analog pen and ink versions well, it's interesting to notice that even the relatively lo-res Q, R, S, T, and U can express themselves with curves, swashes, serifs, and contrast thick and thin.
You can fill grids with anything, of course, from pixels to stitches to people. Here I filled each letter's grid with itself; zoom in close and you'll see the A is made out of A's, the B is made out of B's, and so on. It's a fun exercise to try.
The letters of this alphabet are made out of coarser and coarser grids, starting with an A that is 26 x 26 [that is, 676 dpi] and ending up with a Z made of a single diagonal slash. While the high-res letters express their analog pen and ink versions well, it's interesting to notice that even the relatively lo-res Q, R, S, T, and U can express themselves with curves, swashes, serifs, and contrast thick and thin.
You can fill grids with anything, of course, from pixels to stitches to people. Here I filled each letter's grid with itself; zoom in close and you'll see the A is made out of A's, the B is made out of B's, and so on. It's a fun exercise to try.
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| Dwindling pixels |
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