LAIKA. A Dynamic Font.

Everybody is talking about a new love affair: It's about type and the web. Designers cheer. Finally font-embedding and the features of CSS3 offer us almost all possibilities we know from our beloved print media. Type and typographic design seem to really make the step into the world wide web. But while we are talking about this upcoming progress in using type in digital media, other people think about whether the terms and categories we conceive type in, are still adequate in the new dynamic and interactive contexts.

Nicolas Kunz and Michael Flückiger from Bern, Switzerland make the case that type has to be reconsidered and–as it got rid of its leaden counterpart on your side of the screen–has to pushed beyond the limits of its physical past. The result of their considerations is called LAIKA. What's named after the first terrestrial life form in space–the dog sent into orbit with Sputnik 2 by the Russians in 1957–they describe as:

A font that is able to move between its extremes in real time. An interactive font that is able to respond to its surroundings. A font that questions deadlocked dogmas and throws up completely new design questions, and thus has the potential to revolutionise the understanding of digital typography.

So LAIKA is neither bold nor thin but exists in a permanent state of transition between its extremes controlled by external input. The source of the input can be anything like e.g. the movement of people passing by captured by a camera or the circadian rhythm of a plant translated by sensors into digital signals. Check out the LAIKA website for more examples and an interactive test application.