Noordzij's Cube
Jialin Lu luxxxlucy.github.io November 14 2025
Visualizing Gerrit Noordzij's Cube
Seminal work The Stroke: Theory of Writing.
, which is perhaps the world's first designspace and root of the construction of parametric design and variable font.
It introduces the three fundamental characteristics of letterforms, in the cultural sense that the aesthetic of the letterform is determined by the writing tool of pen.
This is now rather boring, in the next step I will try to recreate the cube with a learning model so that we can be sure that those cultural and aesthetic nuances are indeed capturable by computing machinery. Too many works has been done on AI/ML for typography, but I guess in order for it to be truly recognized, we need to be back to classics and be all on focusing on the nuances.