Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
This tree just created a font
There’s a new experimental typeface in the world of typography, and it was grown on a tree. We’ll explain. In 2016, Danish designer Bjørn Karmann, carved out the 29 letters of the Danish Alphabet onto the bark of a beech tree. He chose a geometric sans-serif font family by Laurenz Brunner. Then he stood back and watched. Over the next five years, he returned to the tree to document what had happened to his carvings.
What he found was fascinating. As the tree grew, it also healed its wounds and left scars, but not in a way that Karmann, 31, could have predicted. As the bark of the tree expanded with time, so did width of the letters. It was like the tree had wielded a calligraphy pen of its own, thickening sides, thinning out edges, nearly obliterating the characteristic holes in its e, g, d, b, a, among others.
“In the beginning, my interest was purely around typography and time. But as the project progressed, and the tree started designing something I could never had thought of, I started feeling less part of the design and more of an observer,” says Karmann. “It made me think about creation alongside nature.”
Karmann has a Master’s from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. In his spare time, he’d make letters out of materials that would decay and disappear. Early experiments included snow, leaves and mushrooms. “They had a short transformation time from minutes to days. So naturally, I started wondering about years of slow natural transformations.”
Karmann has digitised his observations and created a new, progressive, and experimental font. He calls it Occlusion Grotesque (it’s available for free download on his website: Bjoernkarmann.dk/ occlusion-grotesque)
For the next phase of this project, Karmann is working on numbers and symbols. He also wants to take it further to see how the morphing letters can help in the study of how plants heal and trees grow.