Typespace is a 3D variable typeface made for augmented reality.

It is an exploration on what the next-gen font would be. After variable fonts and colour fonts, it felt fitting that AR would require a font designed specifically for the medium’s affordance. When computers and screens gained popularity, there was a need for fonts designed for that technology’s needs. It led to a new wave of typography style. AR has a whole new dimension and physicality attached to it that’s not limited to our screens – simply extruding a font made for two-dimensional media (print and screen) is not enough.

I worked on a 100 Days of AR posters project, through which I realised in AR, every physical space requires different types of considerations to be legible. Every physical space has different lighting, visual clutter, and so on. Making a variable AR typeface makes it easy to tweak the font in AR in the setting it is supposed to be presented. It’s as functional as experimental. Moreover, AR allows this variable font a lot more flexibility with the parametric axis, resulting in diverse variations that are not possible on 2D media.

Ironically, Typespace had to draw a lot from the first generation of digital fonts, like pixel fonts to be as variable as the more recent generation of fonts. Using primitive 3D cubes reduced the computational burden on the device, made it faster to process in AR, and, at the same, gave it the flexibility to be scalable and variable in all dimensions.

Typespace was made/coded in the media it will be used for; Typespace was made in AR for AR. We’re only getting introduced to this new remarkable media, there’s so much to be explored within AR. Typespace is just the beginning of all the explorations I want to do with typography and AR.