Valto Malmiola’s portrait of Sibelius, 1937. It was made with 30,000 so-called rules – strips of metal, often brass or type-cast metal, used for printing lines since the 1500’s.
More works by Valto Malmiola, made with the same technique, 1938-1943.
Images and info from Typographic Art of Valto Malmiola by Heikki Lotvonen, 2023. He mentions that for example Carl Fasol used this technique before Malmiola.
Lena Weber makes incredible variable typefaces that are very graphical, like Gradial used here. It doesn’t look like it, but all this is made of (variable) text characters. Like these:
Lioconcha hieroglyphica is a saltwater clam that makes cellular automata-style patterns in some kind of hieroglyphical or cuneiform way. Also see the textile cone, the lioconcha castrensis and the nature tag here.
Portrait of Jurriaan Schrofer made in 1987 by Total Design, using a font and script that Schroder made in the 1970’s. It achieves this effect not by changing the text characters, as ASCII-converters usually do, but by changing the weight of the type. More info.
Image from Frederike Huygen’s biography Jurriaan Schrofer from 2013.
Maurice Meilleur’s re-creations of a typeface made by Jurriaan Schrofer in the 1970’s for the Dutch street cleaning and garbage removal services. It was designed to be “stencil-friendly”. In the end, it was not used as a monospaced font.
By Jurriaan Schrofer, perhaps in the 1960s? Via Maurice Meilleur.
Jurriaan Schrofer’s stamps for the Netherlands, 1969. The text celebrates 50 years of International Labor Organization (IAO). More images and info in Maurice Meilleur’s excellent research.
