Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering
How about Sensibly Inspired Engineering. All this little venture proves is that, feeling rather godlike, some scientists have succeeded in torturing the building blocks of life into predetermined shapes, without regard for the consequences. Personally, I shudder to think of what kind of life form might emerge if you strung these letterform Frankensteins into a seven-letter sequence that said “be fruitful and multiply yourself”—but not those exact words.
1 Jun 2012 — 7:51pm
Boffins, gotta love ’em.
1 Jun 2012 — 8:23pm
One has to wonder how many fractions of a point their typeface sizes are. The first time anyone would need an SI prefix for a point?
1 Jun 2012 — 9:20pm
If we (incorrectly) use the 42-rung length as the size of the typeface, then it's at 41 μpoint.
2 Jun 2012 — 5:55am
I guess they did not do that in InDeaign.
2 Jun 2012 — 6:39am
My DNA reads "If you can read this, you are standing too close to me".
2 Jun 2012 — 7:43pm
It'll be interesting if serifs evolve.
3 Jun 2012 — 12:57am
Swashes! ;-)
3 Jun 2012 — 12:18pm
Puh-leeze.
Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering
How about Sensibly Inspired Engineering. All this little venture proves is that, feeling rather godlike, some scientists have succeeded in torturing the building blocks of life into predetermined shapes, without regard for the consequences. Personally, I shudder to think of what kind of life form might emerge if you strung these letterform Frankensteins into a seven-letter sequence that said “be fruitful and multiply yourself”—but not those exact words.
(Props to Woody Allen)
3 Jun 2012 — 2:33pm
Hey, don't knock genetic engineering. It's what I madly wanted to get into, but was 3-4 decades too early.
hhp
4 Jun 2012 — 3:30am
Reckon 'DNA strands' sounds a mite more impressive than 'proteins'.
4 Jun 2012 — 8:57am
Was about to create a new post about this news, but will instead simply point you to this alternative news source:
http://gizmodo.com/5914780/harvard-scientists-make-graphic-designers-loo...
The letter blocks are 64-by-103 nanometers.
Also, the article in Nature is here:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7400/full/nature11075.html
This also makes me wish IBM had gone ahead and made a font from the work they did on the atomic logo:
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV1003.html
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/photo/28500.wss
Not sure Stanford could have completed the task with their even smaller technique:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090130154918.htm