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Typophile: The Smaller Picture

Typophile Announces: The Smaller Picture by Kevan Davis

The network is the brain.
Smaller Picture is a truly collaborative experiment where users participate in the real-time growth of a bitmap alphabet. The system, developed by UK programmer Kevan Davis with inputs from Typophile’s Jared Benson, presents a 20 x 20 pixel grid which begins as a random pattern of black and white pixels. Users determine whether a randomly highlighted pixel should be black or white. After thousands of interactions, the characters take shape.

When Typophile proposed using Kevan’s engine for a collaborative alphabet, he was intrigued, and enhanced his code to accommodate a full alphanumeric set. We’re delighted to present it here.

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ENTRY DETAILS
ARCHIVE ID 1220 FILED UNDER Typography
PUBLISHED ON Sep.13.2002 BY long-gone author
WITH COMMENTS
Comments
Armin’s comment is:

The idea seems to be good. Utopian, but good. Right now it looks like a mess, it will be interesting to see how it develops. IF it develops, personally I didn't stay long enough, too many pixels in too many places for too many letters with too many opinions.

I'll deifinitely will check back often to see how it's going.

On Sep.13.2002 at 01:47 PM
Armin’s comment is:

I took another look at it, and I don't know when this thing started but it seems like they are going to finish around the same time the rolling stones finally decide to stop rockin'.

On Sep.13.2002 at 03:54 PM
Jared’s comment is:

The project is getting interesting. Most of the letterforms are recognizable, though it's clear the collective mind is having difficulties with the lowercase.

Personally I'm surprised that the forms are taking shape this quickly. Some of Kevan's other work (www.kevan.org) took 10,000 flips to get to something recognizable.

On Sep.21.2002 at 07:59 PM
Armin’s comment is:

Jared,

Thanks for the update, I'm glad to see it's doing SO well. I really had my doubts, I even checked in on monday or tuesday and it still didn't look right. Good thing you guys kept going and, I guess, now it's going to get interesting. I wonder what is it going to look like? do you intend to later distribute it for free? or what is going to happen after it's all said and done?

On Sep.22.2002 at 10:07 AM
Stephen Coles’s comment is:

Naysayers might want to have a look at where the alphabet is now, 10 days from the launch. The bottom frame is an overview brought to you by Jeff Howard.

The basic shapes are there. Refinement now proceeds.

On Sep.23.2002 at 02:45 AM
Armin’s comment is:

Oh wow! it looks like a cool bitmap grunge font! They should keep some of these versions, and later create a family where you could use the "rough" versions like this in conjunction with the final, smoother font.

On Sep.23.2002 at 07:03 AM
Jared’s comment is:

I should point out that after a long hiatus, The Smaller Picture is back online as of March 2003! It had generated so much traffic from getting blogged everywhere that our host shut it down. It's taken us this long to convince them to re-enable it.

http://www.typophile.com/smallerpicture

On Mar.18.2003 at 01:50 PM
Jared’s comment is:

I should point out that after a long hiatus, The Smaller Picture is back online as of March 2003! It had generated so much traffic from getting blogged everywhere that our host shut it down. It's taken us this long to convince them to re-enable it.

http://www.typophile.com/smallerpicture

On Mar.18.2003 at 01:51 PM