BIGFOOT

Bigfoot is the fattest font ever made.

It began as a simple exercise given to students in a design course: Most people don’t appreciate type because they don’t really know what it actually is. One way to understand it is looking at it like a combination of sculptures that have to work together to achieve a certain harmony, where each letter form is one of those sculptures. Most people understand and appreciate that a sculpture starts from a rock of an incomprehensible form, which is manipulated by someone into becoming the recognizable or abstract work of art it eventually is. Consider type design a kind of two-dimensional sculpting. You have a rectangle. Take away as a little as possible from it until it is recognizable as the letter A. Repeat to get the letter B, and so on.  After all 26 minimal letters are made, do they actually function as an alphabet to build words and sentences that are recognizable to the human eye?

This exercise can trigger thoughts and theories about the overall subjective nature of identifying abstract yet somewhat familiar shapes. It can go into the psyche of art in general. But one thing for certain, this exercise has so far helped a few people find a new appreciation for finely crafted typefaces. If you are a design educator, your students’ typographical perspective and arguments would benefit from it. And if you are a designer, well, fat faces are all the rage these days, and this is as fat as it can get.