Inspiration
Back in early January 2015 I have been taking some photos of a sign on the back of the NG Church in Mossel Baai, South Africa. All the letters have been worn off by the sun, wind and the salty air and I was fascinated by seeing how regular this erosion had happened. I immediately thought I would turn these worn off letters into a font… someday.
Analysis
In the end it took me quite a number of spare evenings to turn this into a layered Photoshop-based font as the text on the sign did not contain all characters. So I had to study how the different letters did react to the conditions to be able to replicate this behavior when creating the missing characters…
Layer 0 — Years ago
Standard self-adhesive characters have been applied and then got eroded over the years.
Layer 1 — UV Erosion
A learning: straight lines peel off differently than curved lines.
Layer 2 — Hard shadows
The light from the South African sun in zenith creates almost vertical, hard and nearly black shadows.
Layer 3 — Residue
A grainy, translucent layer with some leftovers of glue, dust and dirt.
And now?
After all this photoshop work was done I was wondering what to do with WORN now. My initial idea was to use it for a photo book of the South Africa trip as the inspiration came from there. See below some mockups for title pages for some of the places I visited…
