Hofstadter came up with the idea of three-dimensional typefaces back in the 1970s, calling them "trip-lets" (as in "triple letters"). He designed the cover for his Pulitzer Prize-Winning book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, which is a picture of such trip-lets, cut (by Hofstadter) out of wood and then shined light at them from three different directions. Observe:
Apparently there is some kind of thematic value to the trip-lets (beyond simply being clever and cool), since in the book he kind of makes the claim that what Gödel, Escher, and Bach do are all essentially alike in important ways.
Anyway, the trip-lets are cool, and I have stumbled on some websites that exploit their inherent coolness to greater effect. The most interesting one is a art project of many trip-lets (computer images and physical works of art), which employ three different fonts for each letter of the trip-let. I particularly like this example of a "triple Z":
Neat!
Anyway, for some fun, check out Action Types.
Looking it over excites me. I spin into an eddy of thoughts about what possibilities in this creative vein have yet to be actualized. I go scatter-brained with considering variations on this theme. (For instance, imagine whole stories written using these fonts, organized into a narrative "cube". Is it even possible!?)
For a simple puzzle version of the same concept, check this out.
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1 comments:
Oh my gosh. You never told me the subtitle of GEB. I had a friend who once was assigned it for a class, and complained to me about how massive and bizarre it was. I double checked the title with her so I could check out its strangeness later, and promptly forgot about it. Ha.
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