Our chums over at Hato studio have recently been in Milan for the Salone design shenanigans, creating the Eight Heads High installation, which also lives as an online project that lets you use your very own human body as a font. Using a webcam (or IRL, if you were also in Milano), users can cast shapes and poses to create proportions for the Regular, Italic, Condensed, Extended, and Small Caps versions of a new Hato-designed font.
“Eight Heads High explores modular measurements and its relation to humanistic design,” Hato explains. The piece is inspired by Vitruvius’ hypothesis and Da Vinci’s drawing L’Uomo Vitruviano (Vitruvian Man), which depicted the perfect body proportions as being eight heads high. Hato combined these ideologies with modern day design tech so that “from the tallest stance to the deepest lunge, each and everyone’s poses and ratios” can be added to a wider database which will determine the final proportions of the font. Why not try doing the Macarena in front of your webcam, in the name of furthering typography? I know I did, and I don’t regret a thing.