Inspirational sites
MINIMAL WIM
https://raffinaderij.booreiland.amsterdam/minimalwim
Minimalism is again a theme for our next pick but in a
markedly different way. Minimal Wim is actually an
in-house web experiment produced by Amsterdam agency
Booreiland, as tribute to a Dutch design legend.
Willem Hendrik ‘Wim’ Crouwel was a pioneering advocate
of using grids to produce layouts and lettering. His geometric
approach to typography, typified by his iconic New Alphabet
font, will remain influential beyond his death last September.
This site marks that passing touchingly by highlighting
how Crouwel’s concepts can find a home within the browser,
leveraging CSS and SVG techniques. “At Booreiland, we have a
monthly experimenting day,” explains creative director Wimer
Hazenberg. “As a tribute, I dedicated my experiment to Wim
Crouwel and wondered if I could create a complete alphabet
from a 3x3 grid.” No actual fonts are embedded, with the
myriad blocky characters all generated instead and subjected
to various effects. All scroll controlled, these transitions
illustrate how a solid square or ‘building block’ can be dissected
and manipulated to form characters. The contrasting black,
white and red colour palette highlights nicely how applying
rules to negative space offers limitless possibilities. In fact, by
defining the system algorithmically, the site asserts an entire
alphabet can be stored in just 59 bytes.
HTML5, WEBGL, PIXI.JS