By Ou Zhang, 2022. From cloud.cb (野雲).

Cover design for TYPE01 issue 7 by Tameem Sankari, 2023. Original video and photo.

More Sankari

Self-portraits rendered in the code used to generate the images, by Eric Furst, 2024 (aka Eric Fischer). More details here.

More code calligrams.

WEAVING PATTERNS FOR POETRY by Egidija Čiricaitė, 2023. Part of the TYPEWRITTEN series from psw gallery.

Halis Biçer, 1972.

Emin Barin, 1970s

Emin Barin and Halis Biçer started to make square kufic calligraphy with Latin letters in the 1970s. Most, if not all, square kufic were previously in Arabic. Barin was inspired by the younger Biçer, according to Enis Tan’s PhD thesis, A study of Kufic script in Islamic calligraphy and its relevance to Turkish graphic art using Latin fonts in the late twentieth.

FF Beowulf by Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum, published in 1990. A typeface that looks different every time it’s typed, because there is Postscript code to randomize the outlines. The original authors have made a new version called LTR Beowulf.

Calcula by Shiva Nallaperumal and Tal Leming, 2017. A square kufic typeface that has thousands of ligatures to change the letter according different combinations.

Julian Hespenheide, 2021. link

grid=75×75 / tiles= 8px
String charSet = ” !#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~”;
font=Courier New

Julian Hespenheide, 2023

Resolution : 1080×1080
Grid size : 60×60
Radius : *1.2
Char sets : ▒░░▒▒ ░░░▒▒▓▔▕▖▗▘▙▚▛▜▝▞▟▒▒▒░░ ░ ░ ▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓

2023

Grid size= 48×48
Char sets=  ↑↗→↘↓˙◤◤◢..◤◤◢◢⋰⋱/:_◜◞

2023

Resolution : 1080×1080
Grid size : 64×64
Radius : *2.0
Char sets : ░▒▓▔▕▖▗▘▙▚▛▜▝▞▟

2023

Resolution : 1080×1080
Grid size : 128×128
Radius : *1.2
Char sets : $@B%8&WM#*oahkbdpqwmZO0QLCJUYXzcvunxrjft/\|()1{}[]?-_+~<>i!lI;:,\”^`’.

2023

Resolution= 1080×1080
Grid size= 64×64
Char sets= ↑↗→↘↓˙╷┬┐┌─╴╶╵┴┘└│┤├

2022

Resolution= 600×600 [0]
Grid size= 100×100
Char sets= ░▒▓▔▕▖▗▘▙▚▛▜▝▞▟
Font= C64Pro-6

We’ve got some catching up to do with Julian Hespenheide, who’s been productive with code, charsets and fonts while this blog was in hiatus mode. This is a circular selection, but more stuff is coming.