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The Autodesk Gallery at One Market in San Francisco celebrates design — the process of taking a great idea and turning it into a reality. With about 60 different exhibits regularly on display that showcase the innovative work of Autodesk customers, the gallery illustrates the role technology plays in great design and engineering. Autodesk Gallery Ambassadors conduct gallery tours as a sideline to their day jobs. The tours provide ambassadors with opportunities to practice public speaking in front of small groups.
The Writing Comes Full Circle exhibit can be found on the 2nd floor of our One Market office in San Francisco.
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Kanakoro is a 3D format font developed by Kyushu University student, Yohei Mizobe. Kyushu University, located in Fukuoka, Japan, has over 18,000 students from 92 countries and regions. Students conduct funded research on behalf of corporations or other partners who choose the university because of the diversity of its researchers and research facilities.
Yohei Mizobe's project Kanakoro explores the future of writing and typeface in an era of technological change and transition. Just as design has evolved from the use of pencil and paper, to computers and 2D design, to modern collaborative 3D design software, typeface has had to evolve alongside the tools and innovations that humans use to present it. No longer the engraving of stone, or pen to paper, typeface displays on screens of various sizes and orientations. As we now transition into a 3D design reality, typeface also needs to evolve to be properly represented in a 3D format.
Out of three Japanese alphabet fonts, Yohei Mizobe selected "Hiragana" as the basis for developing his 3D font due to its already beautiful, flowy visual expression:
Hiragana image source: Wikipedia
For the Kanakoro font, each 3D printed Hiragana design not only represents the font's character but also accentuates the decorative visuals that occur in Hiragana — many times overlooked or underappreciated in 2D representations. To produce his font, Yohei used Fusion 360 to project each Hiragana character onto a sphere to produce its Kanakoro counterpart:
The result of Yohei's work is a character set that takes font design to the next dimension — in this case, 3D.
Can you read the word in the last row?
The result is a character set that changes personality when viewed from different angles. In 2014, Yohei won an award at Tokyo Design Week 2014, ASIA Design Award 2014 Student Grand Prix with Kanakoro. After using Autodesk Fusion 360 for ideation and prototyping, he 3D printed the final typeface.
Thanks to the Autodesk Gallery team for the descriptive text for this blog post.
Autodesk has always been an automation company, and today more than ever that means helping people make more things, better things, with less; more and better in terms of increasing efficiency, performance, quality, and innovation; less in terms of time, resources, and negative impacts (e.g., social, environmental). Designing in a 3D context instead of 2D has long been a part of what we help our customers do.
The Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco is open to the public on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. There is a guided tour on Wednesdays at 12:30 pm and a self-guided audio tour available anytime. Admission is free. Visit us.
Twenty-first-century calligraphy is alive in the lab.