The Earth's surface offers a goldmine of potential letterforms.
For the uninitiated, Google Earth offers an exciting way to explore the world with interactive satellite images, without even leaving your room!
The above letterforms I sourced from the Tweed Shire in NSW, Australia. The letter ‘H’ is actually the high school I attended for six years, and the letter ‘r’ is a motorway I have driven on a number of times! ‘A’ and ‘T’ are sugar cane fields (from separate farms), and ‘E’ is a residential canal development.
Finding letters in a satellite view of the landscape is by no means a new undertaking, however it is rather painstaking! Graphic designer Rhett Dashwood sourced the entire alphabet from aerial images of Victoria (read the article about his accomplishment). As far as I know, Dashwood was the first to create an alphabet from Google Earth.
If you want to harvest your own letters from the landscape, it’s relatively simple:
- Download Google Earth, if you haven’t already.
- Zoom in to a low altitude (an ‘Eye alt’ of about 15kms or less is ideal).
- Explore! Once you’ve found a feature that looks like a letter, take a screenshot (shift+command+3 for Macs, or for Windows press ‘print screen’ on keyboard [or alt+Prt Sc]).
- Open the screenshot in an image editing program (i.e. Photoshop/Gimp).
- Crop to a tight square, to eliminate the surrounding landscape.
- Save As (type in letter name, i.e. A, B… whatever it looks like).
- To make words, you’ll need to open a new document in the image editor.
- Duplicate (or copy+paste) the letters from separate files as new layers in the document.
- Arrange using the Move tool. When you’ve spelt out your message, save the file as a psd, then save a copy as a jpg.
A few tips:
- Search over land, near cities or areas with human occupation. As far as I know, remote deserts and oceans don’t yield many letters!
- It might be an idea to attach placemarks (those bright yellow pins) to the places that you find letters, for future reference (I wish I did this).
- Searching for the alphabet on Google Earth can be time-consuming. If you widen your search area, it may be a lot easier to find letters.
- Be adventurous!
experimental typography 