A typeface made of tape

Twenty-six characters, each one made from gaffer tape stuck to the studio floor, photographed from above on a stepladder and traced badly on purpose.

The constraint was that no piece of tape could be cut — only torn — which sets the minimum stroke and gives every terminal that ragged edge you cannot draw convincingly by hand. Torn tape has a grain. It fails in one direction and not the other, and the letters carry that asymmetry.

The lowercase is unusable below about forty point and the g is a disaster.

It is not a good typeface. The lowercase is unusable below about forty point and the g is a disaster. But it is an honest one: every quirk in it is a physical fact about adhesive rather than a stylistic decision, and it settles arguments about display type faster than a mood board does.

We use it for internal titles and the occasional exhibition banner. The full tape rig took an afternoon and about eleven pounds of tape.