Panspermia

Panspermia is a series of shapes (no letterforms) generated from some stickers my daughter Emily had. When the stickers are peeled off the backing sheet, a set of negative shapes are left. I found these shapes to be quite compelling, and the result is this three family font. More…

In all variations, the caps are drawn by hand, and the lowercase is auto-traced. The differences are not really apparent until the characters are very large. There’s Pos, Neg, and Out versions. The Pos is simply the shapes. The Neg is the shapes reversed out of a rectangle. The Out version is made by the difference between the hand drawn and auto-traced versions and the resulting outline (hence the name, Out). The caps of Out are reversed out of a rectangle resulting in a white line on black field; the lower case is a black line on white.
So that “text” can be set, all the major punctuation marks ( . , : ; ! ? ) have characters. There are characters for the numbers and their uppercase, too. The numbers were constructed by taking the narrowest characters and stretching them so they fit in a square.

The name Panspermia comes from the idea that the earth was seeded with life by an extraterrestrial source from the solar system or beyond it. This relates nicely to the comet-like and animal-like shapes of the font.