A Typeface Made Of Exploding Virtual Paint

by Deborah Corn
Creative, Design, Tools

By Belinda Lanks

A Typeface Made Of Exploding Virtual Paint – Skyrill.coms letterforms look like splashes of paint frozen in mid-air.

We’ve seen our fair share of clever typefaces, based on everything from photocopied hands to Ghandi’s rounded spectacles, but rarely have we come across a typeface with as much energy and motion as this typeface, which freezes the look of exploding paint in legible letterforms.

The project is the work of Skyrill.com, two enterprising brothers based in Manāma, Bahrain. “I really love how fluids look when floating in the air like raindrops, or splashing as they hit the ground,” Hussain Almossawi tells Co.Design. “That made me want to work along the lines of mixing typography and fluids.” After exploring several visual approaches, he and his brother, Ali, settled on paint bursting under high pressure.

To achieve that effect, Almossawi used RealFlow, a fluids simulation tool that allowed him to flood letterforms with paint and tweak the gravity and pressure levels: “Once the letterform was filled up, I’d release the original shape holding the fluid and allow the letter to explode and splash around hitting the ground.”