May 26, 2017 | By Benedict
Maciej Kodzis and Grzegorz Owczarek, of Polish design studio Pillcrow, have been helping budding designers create new fonts with the help of 3D printed guides. The duo used a ZMorph 3D printer to make 3D printed grips for their typographical tools.
While most of us rely on classic fonts like Helvetica and Times New Roman, the library of fonts these days goes way behind what Microsoft provides for us. In fact, font creation is now a popular field of design—you can make them by hand-drawing each letter, by cutting your own stamps, and by other means too.
At Pillcrow, a design studio in Poland, a group of typeface junkies are using 3D printing to assist their font creation. Using a ZMorph Multitool 3D printer, designers Maciej Kodzis and Grzegorz Owczarek have been able to 3D print grips for a set of individual font-making stamps. 3D printing helped the design experts create the grips in a short space of time; once printed, the grips were then glued to PVC foam stamps.
Pillcrow recently held a font-making workshop in which a number of budding type designers each had 10 minutes to design a new look for the letters A, D, and G using just a couple of these 3D printed stamps. Each stamp had a simple shape that could form part of a letter. At the end of each 10 minute session, the participants swapped their stamps with a neighbor before proceeding to try a new design.
In just one hour, the group managed to come up with nearly a hundred new font designs. Some were better than others, but the exercise proved just how quickly creativity can bloom with the right tools.
The Pillcrow designers said that, although 3D printing was only used to create the grips for the stamps, their ZMorph Multitool could also have been used to cut out the foam stamps. The machine could even be used to cut the complete letters, rather than the simple shapes that were used in combination to form letters.
“This simple application clearly shows how 3D printing can deliver really amazing results and add value to every type of creative endeavors,” commented ZMorph’s Marcin Traczyk.
While most 3D printers don’t have the resolution to print, say, small physical types for a printed book, the technology has been used in other areas of printed media. Back in 2015, Dutch craftsman Luc Volders used 3D printing to create artificial leather book covers. A year before that, car company Aston Martin commissioned an impressive 3D printed typeface.
Posted in 3D Printing Application
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