Mathematical Beauty: The “Law” of Optical Volumes
Wired magazine just had a redesign and trumpeted that their redesigned logo obeyed the Law of Optical Volumes. Some commenters noted that this is basic kerning. Well, yes and no. Kerning is not typically this mathematic, which is related to why the word “law” grabbed my eye. This implies there is an algorithm to do this automatically… you know, if this whole exercise isn’t just crap.
The gist of it is that you don’t just want the distance between each point of the font to be equal, you want the spacing between all letters in a word to have the same volume (actually area, volume implies 3D space, but whatev) between them. The image on the article really is worth a thousand words.
So, there’s something interesting to note about the font they used - it’s blocky! Talk about an easy job. The kerning example images on wikipedia give a better impression about where dragons may rest:
Which is the best WAR? (That sounds horrible, but at least this way I don’t have to make images.) The bottom has the WA pair very close, and the AR has quite a bit of space at the top. Is the top pair correct? The area between WA may match the AR, but it almost looks like there’s a space in there. And what do you do for letters like capital L?
There’s gotta be a Golden Ratio afoot somewhere in here.