Organic typography* — biocomposite based lettercuts for a conference’s title

Cutting letters is an old profession. With the emergence of computer aided design and with the availability of plastic foams anyone can have their own letters. It is used mainly in interiors as logotypes or for other marketing / advertising reasons — just make it big.

We had a conference at our university recently (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design) where my colleagues asked me if I could make the title of the conference “Future Materials” out of mycelium biocomposite. Since I really like challenges, especially unknown ones so that I have to figure out a proper method to execute, I immediately said yes.

Below is the process that I followed during the creation of the title.

Growing and molding

First, I grown the biocomposite in proper size in order to make it readable from a distance. This was limited by the available mold that I used, which has a dimension of approximately 60x40 cm. In preparation I created a template file with all the required letters to fit into this size.

Raw material just dried and ready to cut

Since we needed fifteen letters, it was a challenge to grow all of them in a really sort period of time, but growing them parallelly all was done in two weeks time.

Multiple blocks of mycelium based biocomposites for lettering

Cut the letters

The second step was laser cutting the letters. We never did such a thing, so we needed to experiment with the laser in order to figure out the best settings for the cuts. It turned out that multiple cuts needed in order to prevent the fully dried composites starting embers. You can see on one of the final letters that this process still needs to be improved further.

Laser cutting the letters is fun, but you should have a fire extinguisher around

The process resulted in all the letters cut and ready to be installed. There are some glitches because of the ember, but those are barely noticable.

The bottom of the letters “a” and “F” were burnt due to dry weed particles in the biocomposite and high temperature

Install the letters

The final result was installed and ready to be a spot of selfies. We just lay down the letters on the hillside in front of the conference entrance, so nature can also participate in the letter-forming. There was a rain during the conference and afterwards, so it was soaked in water, and mold started to appear on the surface on the letters.

Final letter cuts on the hillside at Moholy-Nagy University of Arts

Organic development didn’t stop here, since after the conference finished, the university students started to play with the letters and created anagrams. Yes, this is an arts and design university, so creativity roars here.

Anagrams created by the students

*”Organic typography” is a term a typorgrapher friend of mine used, Ákos Polgárdi, all credits go to him.