A printed essay where each paragraph is rendered in a different, randomly selected typeface.
Found on Il Covile, an Italian publication exploring typography, philosophy, and design.
The text is presented in both Italian and English.
The text is presented in both Italian and English.
The authors also created a LibreOffice extension that applies random fonts to any document, allowing users to experiment with the same generative approach directly. It's called "Patina": https://www.ilcovile.it/V3_p_patina.html
MultifokalHirn•1w ago
cool, thank you!
rgovostes•46m ago
The technique applied is not randomly selecting a different typeface per paragraph, but tweaking the glyph shapes when a character is repeated. Glancing at the LibreOffice extension, it seems to slightly vary CharScaleWidth by 90–110% and CharEscapementHeight by 97–100% of the base height.
mock-possum•37m ago
Delightful! I wonder whether I could achieve this effect in pure css…
rgovostes•18m ago
I made a brief attempt of splitting each character into a separate <span style="transform: scale(<random>, <random>)">c</span>, but it doesn't look good because the transform is applied after the glyph is rasterized. I didn't see a way to scale the font size itself in two different axes, and applying a single scaling factor of 97-100% does not perfectly recreate the effect. text-rendering: geometricPrecision probably helps.
misone•1w ago
The text is presented in both Italian and English.
The authors also created a LibreOffice extension that applies random fonts to any document, allowing users to experiment with the same generative approach directly. It's called "Patina": https://www.ilcovile.it/V3_p_patina.html
MultifokalHirn•1w ago
rgovostes•46m ago