For Naturephiles simplest: A Typeface fabricated from trees

Irish artist Katie Holten’s new ebook About bushes is not just a e-book about timber—it is written in timber.

applying 26 completely different tree species to characterize the completely different letters in the Roman alphabet, the texts in About bushes vary from Jorge Luis Borges and Ursula okay. Le Guin to up to date writers like Robert McFarlane and architect Natalie Jeremijenko (who helped design London’s TREE x place of job).

On one web page, the text appears in English (Holten uses the font Walbaum as a result of baum is German for “tree.”) On the alternative page, the text has been translated into the Tree typeface, which Holten designed with the help of fashion designer Katie Brown especially for the book.

“it is just like a kids’s e book,” says Holten, or an illustrated Morse code. The reader simplest must refer back to the key to translate certainly one of Holten’s typographic forests back into English, although shorter texts are more straightforward to translate than longer ones.

“basically, the tree typeface is four occasions the scale of the normal font,” Holten says. “The designers notion it could be extremely boring to have hundreds of pages of trees, in order that’s when the idea of the woodland came about. We condensed it [to fit on one page].”

nevertheless it’s extra than just symbolic translation. The methods through which timber sprout and develop in nature can also be manifested in the kind layout. “If it can be a small textual content, they may be all legible and visual. If it can be a large textual content it can be all overgrown and wooded as a wooded area can be anyhow,” Holten says.

In observe, the short selection from Borges’s Funes, In memory is handiest a in moderation wooded panorama, while Jules Verne’s What is this? is a dense pine forest. In homage to Ada Lovelace, the primary pc programmer, Holten translated an excerpt from Sketch of the Analytical Engine first into binary code and then into twigs, which correspond to the zero-9 digits.

every story looks different—sparse, thick, twiggy, wooded—when its translated into its own distinctive landscape the use of Tree. As Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG suggests, the other can be that you can think of: shall we conceivably use Holten’s tree font to translate landscapes into text. Our forests might grow into encrypted messages or our backyards might tell our favourite short story (i’d make a choice Borges’s garden of the Forking Paths and hope it grew to become out a labyrinth). The political resistance actions of the future might keep up a correspondence secret messages with timber—and go down in history because the slowest revolution ever.

Holten is in full compliance with these plans, and in reality has a few ideas of her personal. “I used to be studying concerning the Obama library today. Their funds is one thing like $1 billion. I immediately was once thinking, ‘i ponder if they are enthusiastic about landscaping the garden and need some kind of typographic forest?” she says with a laugh. “i believe like this is just starting, there is a lot more to come. more volumes—and i need [the typeface] to be planted in actual lifestyles, too.”

except then, that you would be able to get your personal replica of Holten’s About timber through pre-ordering on her website online. The guide is out September 2015.