Artistic fonts offer a way to transform any text into an art print,
interactive software, or animation. Thus we can view artistic fonts as a form
of generative art: whereas most generative art is determined by an initial
random seed, with fonts the “seed” is arbitrary text. An advantage
of this approach is that the resulting print can encode one or more messages.
With puzzle fonts, where the letters are encoded but not explicit in the
glyphs, this message can be hidden within the resulting artwork.
We demonstrate this approach to generative art using a series of mathematical
and puzzle fonts we have designed over the years, which are available as free
interactive web apps from https://erikdemaine.org/fonts.
Figure 1 and Figure 2 show two examples of art prints designed with two of our
fonts: one font that reveals itself when folding translucent paper in half and
another based on glass cane from the art of glass blowing.