Serri is a typeface grown from robotically-tended Serratia marcescens
Motivation
Inspired by a class I took on modular and generative type design, I’m dreaming of designing and growing a font with the Genspace community. Some motivating thoughts and emotions include:
The joy of combining some things I love such as language, robotics, and microbiology.
Words are already highly expressive, and using a custom designed typeface that is biologically grown as the mediator for the words evoke a different voice that felt novel and playful to me. I love making art with robots.
I love how robot programming makes the work reproducible but its interaction with physical or biological material make individual results special. At Genspace there is an Opentrons pipetting robot which can be used to precisely move biological samples.
Workflow
I chose to use the bacteria Serratia marcescens for growing the font, because it produces a vivid red color. And also because it was the first bacteria that I cultured at Genspace, so it felt fitting to use it to make my first microbial font.
The workflow I came up with uses a visual programming network in the SideFX Houndini visual effects software to transform a photo of a hand-drawn letter into points that I can send to the Opentrons. I thought it would look nicer to randomly distribute the points, so I used something called blue noise, which provides a way to randomly scatter points without having gaps of different sizes.
Making the Font
Once I had the workflow I started making a full alphabet. I ran through the workflow for each letter at Genspace and then left them to grow and crossed my fingers.
Once they had all had a chance to grow I took photos of them and turned them into a real font using the Glyph app that we learned about in the type design class. Then I could use it in programs on my computer like any other font! And share it with other people for them to use too.
I included a description of the project in the Risograph-printed zine that we made together at the end of our class.
What’s Next?
I’m collecting hand-drawn letters from the Genspace community. Once I have a full alphabet I’m going to regrow the font and release it.
But you can also play around with the work in progress type here