Night Harbour needs to work on a poster at noon and a forty-metre screen at midnight. Most typefaces fall apart at one end of that range. So we’re drawing our own, from light.
A grid of bulbs
Each letter sits on a grid of dots, five wide and seven high, like the lamps strung along the cranes in the port. On a screen, every dot is a light that can switch on, dim or flicker in time with the music.
Five by seven sounds small. It is, and that’s the point. A letter with thirty-five possible lights has nowhere to hide a weak shape, so every character was redrawn until it read at a glance from the far side of the water.
In print the dots soften into a warm glow on deep harbour blue, so the posters feel lit from behind even in daylight.
Fewer dots, more space
Our first alphabet packed the dots tightly, and on screen they blurred into ordinary letters. Pulling them apart by a third fixed it. The gaps are what make the type look like light rather than ink.
The gaps between the dots do half the drawing.
Testing on the cranes
This week we’re running the first animations on the real screens, at full size, at night. It’s the only honest test there is.
Kwabena has a list of twelve words to try, from the festival’s name to the word “exit”. If a word can’t be read from the far quay in two seconds, it goes back to the grid.
