Futura, Deconstructed

There’s a typeface you’ve seen a thousand times, maybe without knowing its name. Futura appears on Stanley Kubrick’s title cards, NASA mission patches, and approximately half the minimalist brand redesigns of the last decade. It’s built on a precise idea: that letters are just geometry.

I’ve been staring at Futura for, I dunno, years now. But recently I started wondering what would happen if I took the idea that letters are just geometry seriously, and broke the letterforms apart into repeating pieces, and then used those pieces to build something new.

That’s how I ended up deep in the world of Truchet tiles. A Truchet tile is simple in concept: Take a square, draw a curve connecting the midpoints of two of its sides, and you have one tile. Rotate it, flip it, combine it with its neighbours, and suddenly simple geometry produces something that looks almost organic, flowing and knotted in ways that feel like they shouldn’t be possible from such a constrained set of moves. The mathematician Sébastien Truchet described the idea in 1704, and people have been doing fun things with it ever since.

So, what I’m doing is I’m deconstructing Futura’s letterforms into a set of Truchet-compatible tiles. I’m pulling out the curves and diagonals of various individual characters, and I’m taking that geometry and turning them into something tileable. The image above is an early digital experiment with what those tiles can produce when you start combining them freely.

But fuck digital images, as an aspiring printmaker here’s where it gets fun. My friend Jarred works with 3D printers, and we’re working on taking these tile designs to turn them into physical, printable objects. Actual relief-printing tiles you can ink up and press, the way a typesetter once arranged individual letters, except instead of spelling words we’re building patterns, with each arrangement producing a unique print.

It’s early days. We don’t even have our studio set up yet. But the direction is clear, and I’m excited enough about it that I wanted to share it before I’d worked out all the details. Stick around.