Typefaces are usually quite static—they may change in font by becoming bolder, italicized, or shifting up a size or two, but essentially, the typeface as a stylistic unit remains the same. Not so with interactive typeface Helvetica Face from artist Naoki Nishimura. It’s a livetype font format, meaning that it’s adaptive and has the ability to change in real-time based on the data inputs it receives. For Helvetica Face, this data takes the form of an image of your face.It seems Naoki Nishimura enjoys using the human face in his work—three of his former projects revolve around distorting captured images of himself. Pliable Mirror turns the face into undulating polygons, Cubic Mirror transforms it into a wall of voxels, and Multi Dimensional Mirror splinters it into fracturing squares.But Helvetica Face is different because in addition to connecting with the user by locating him, quite literally, at the heart of this interactive artwork, the project is also a crowdsourced online typeface repository. As an online project, it hits all the right notes in terms of user engagement: it’s collaborative, interactive, experimental, and immediate. So should you want to immortalize your face in type, you can do so by heading to the Helvetica Face site, clicking on a letter, then clicking on “Join This Glyph”. You will then be taken to the following screen:
On this page the application will activate your webcam so it can take a picture, allowing you to adjust the black and white balance. Once you’re happy with it, you click capture and it takes your image and formats it into a letter (below).You have now joined the ranks of the glyph, which changes whenever someone else adds the form of their face to it. As with any typeface, there are letters as well as numerals and symbols. If you’re using Google Chrome, you can utilise the typeface by changing a set URL into Helvetica Face but, obviously, the writing is very small and the detail is lost. If nothing else, it’s great fun and must be one of the the first projects that brings interactivity and networked aesthetics to the world of typography, not to mention, a fun way to “humanize” and personalize a notoriously expressionless font.
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