IQ Font

“IQ Font’” was created in 2009 by Zach Lieberman and a team of typographers and a professional racing driver. They created a font using a car. First they designed a typeface that could be driven by a car. They attached colored dots to the top of a car and filmed its motion with an overhead camera. Software tracked the colored dots in real time and outputted the result as a letter. Using this process, they developed typeface for all the letters, numbers, and many useful special characters. Here’s a video of their process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5mTDbAG5Hw

I selected this project because I thought it was really cool how they used something physical (the car driving around with colored dots) in combination with software. Also, this project is different from others that I have seen because its final product is something that can be used over and over. The work of art is not just the typeface they generated, but also any document that uses their font in the future. It’s pretty cool how their project, which is completed, can be incorporated into new works of art over and over again.    

The only real critique I have of this project is that the documentation on the DevArt website is not great. The explanation of how the car's movements are turned into font letters is essentially glossed over - they simply say that the software translates the data. Reading this made me want to do a better job documenting my projects for this gallery.

One idea I want to take from this project to incorporate into our final project is the combination of physical and software. It would be cool to create or perform some action in the physical world and then use software to translate it into some form of digital art.    

(See more about the project at https://devart.withgoogle.com/#/catalogued/6593679426846720)