Solar System: Uranus

"Uranus"  |  digital print, 27" × 43"

Solar System: The Moon

"The Moon"  |  digital print, 27" × 43"

Solar System: The Sun

"The Sun"  |  digital print, 27" × 43"

Solar System: The Sun and Venus

"The Sun and Venus"  |  digital print, 27" × 43"

Solar System: Saturn

"Saturn"  |  digital print, 27" × 43"

Here is the new member of the Solar System poster series: Saturn, the jewel of our system.

Archetype Sans: the story of a typeface with multiple faces

You've probably seen this type of image before. There are several variations, all generated according to the same principles. Take a few hundreds of photographs of individuals, and superimpose them by applying a high transparency value on each. If the frame and proportions are similar for all images, a resulting image will appear, similar to those at the top.

You will see an anonymous face, without specific age or apparent defect, and with an undeniable elegance reminiscent of the beauty of classical sculptures from ancient Greece. In this example, the experiment was conducted with photographs of women of the same nationality, and the result shows a typical picture of the country.

National Geographic has also tried the experiment, but this time with thousands of photographs of men of all nationalities of the world. Here is, according to them, the most typical man on Earth:

His features clearly indicate that a large percentage of the current population of our planet is of Asian origin, something that the Caucasian in me often tend to forget.

And what does all this have to do with a font? I'm getting there, be patient. The English term for a font family is typeface. Type and face, literally, the "face of a letter."

If it is possible to generate these images from human faces, it should also be possible to do the same exercise with "faces of letters" to get a glimpse of the most typical form of the "face" of a given alphabet...That's why I tried the experiment, with rather unexpected results.

First, I thought to restrict the choice of fonts to one family, sans serif, or sans. When the sample has too many variations, the outcome is unclear. It would be therefore unnecessary to overlap, for example, scripts on serifs. Then I selected a hundred fonts among the sans serif family (classics like Helvetica, Univers and Futura, and newer fonts like Myriad, Arial and Gotham), and made a first test with the letter A by superimposing all the fonts with transparency in Illustrator.

A fuzzy "A".

A fuzzy "A", resulting from the superposition of one hundred different fonts. But that can be better defined by changing the brightness and contrast of the image.

A clearer "A".

A typical "A" sans serif. The archetype of the "A" sans serif. Its rounded corners betray its nebulous origin, but its proportions are perfect.

If we apply the same method to all the characters, all the glyphs are clearly defined, and the weights, with few exceptions, are consistent and properly distributed. The ideal base for a font.

The contours are drawn in Illustrator and then imported and assembled in FontForge, to be exported in OpenType format. It is a daunting task, but the result is worth it.

Here is the beta version of two members of the Archetype Sans family, Roman and Medium. Others will follow, but much work remains to be done before a final version of these two variants is ready to use.

I love the elegance of this typeface. It is classic, simple and unpretentious. It has only one fault: it has no characteristic feature. It's not a surprise when you think of its origin.

It was not created by a designer, it appeared because it always existed.

Solar System: Jupiter

"Jupiter"  |  digital print, 27" × 43"

I recently began conducting a series of large format posters (27 "× 43") with the theme of the main planets of the Solar System. Here is the first of this series, majestically opened by none other than Jupiter.

This image is a montage assembled from a high-resolution photograph taken by the Cassini spacecraft in December 2000 during its flyby of Jupiter and a high-resolution photograph of the Milky Way taken by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). The use of high-resolution images gives the final product a phenomenal precision.

This poster is available on request by contacting the author.

Pale Blue Dot: ethical considerations on the "restoration" of a classic image

"Pale Blue Dot" in original size and color.

On February 14, 1990, having completed its primary mission, the Voyager 1 spacecraft was commanded by NASA to turn around and photograph the planets of the solar system. NASA compiled the 60 images of this unique event in a series called "Family Portrait".

One of the pictures returned was of Earth, from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), showing up as a pale blue dot in the grainy photograph you see above; this picture would be later known as "Pale Blue Dot". Yes, that tiny blue dot on the right is really the Earth.

"Pale Blue Dot" is also a book inspired by this picture, written in 1994 by Carl Sagan, where he describes the image in these words :

«From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.»

A mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. A wonderful picture that brings another perspective on Life, the Universe, and Everything.

A wonderful picture, of course, but of poor quality. Its original size is 600 × 442 pixels, which is infinitesimal when compared to the multi-megapixel capacities of our most rudimentary contemporary appliances. But we must ponder upon the 6 billion kilometers traveled at the speed of light by each of these pixels to better appreciate the feat that represents the image, no matter how small it is.

And even if the photograph was taken with the darkest filter and the shortest possible exposure (5 milliseconds) to avoid saturating the camera's vidicon tube with sunlight, the result is grainy and overexposed.

This is ruminating on the technical limitations of the era that came to me the idea of ​​trying to solve this problem. It would be relatively easy to improve the sharpness, resolution and brightness of the image with my trusty Photoshop to make, for example, a large poster or wallpaper. But just how far can we modify or alter a historical picture like this without betraying its very essence, its authenticity, its substance-full marrow?

The vast majority of astronomical images provided by various space agencies to the media are manipulated prior to being published. A little more contrast here, a little less light there, and reframe... Some of them are transmitted in shades of gray by satellites to be colored later by specialists, and others are completely recolored to highlight some phenomenon. In short, unless you browse through the space agencies' archives providing access to raw images taken by the various ongoing missions, most of us will rarely see an astronomical image that wasn't "improved" first.

Only there's this small thing. "Pale Blue Dot", the image you see above, has never been altered. What you see is exactly what the Voyager spacecraft sent us, pixel for pixel. It may be of poor quality, but this defect gives it extra power. Because one of the grains of this diffraction effect, the one slightly lighter than the others, is our planet.

So I was well aware that any attempt to restore or improve the image would be futile because the real beauty of this picture, its deeper meaning lies in its initial imperfection. But as I was curious to see the result, I tried some experiments while trying to minimize the number of changes in order to stay as close as possible to the original. After several attempts and a few hours of handling layers, transparency, filters and all, this picture appeared.

"Pale Blue Dot", "improved" version.

No pixel was removed or added. Everything that is in this picture was on the original, the only compromise I had to make was to apply a Gaussian blur filter on the rays in the background to eliminate graininess, which also reduced the sharpness of the light rays. But as these are artifacts are caused by the lenses, I felt it was better to keep their beautiful prismatic colors than emphasize their exact shape, which is arbitrary.

The image was also greatly enlarged (more than 2500 pixels in height), which offers the possibility of making a printed large-format poster without aliasing, or a high-resolution wallpaper.

I like the final result, which is technically superior to the original, but I still have some doubts... "Pale Blue Dot" is a unique, historic image. It is the Mona Lisa of astronomical photographs. Can we really change it, no matter how slightly, without thinking about the ethical implications of such an act of treason and risk suffering the wrath of purists who will not fail to be offended? Maybe not, after all. What do you think?

But if you'd like to use it as a wallpaper, feel free to use this cropped and resized version.

"Pale Blue Dot", wallpaper format (1900 × 1200).

Because it is sometimes better to admire the splendor offered by the Universe, and leave aside the ethical considerations.