_Type:Rider

Designers have long known that the right font can bring a document to life. With Type:Rider, it’s the typefaces themselves that come alive as characters in a playable exploration of the history of typography. Players are represented in the game by a textual avatar—two dots that resemble a colon or an umlaut—as they roll and ricochet through stylized levels designed to portray certain periods of typographical history. The challenge is to negotiate a landscape made of letters, from the hieroglyphic texts of the Egyptians to the bold lines of Art Deco. Along the way, insights and information on the history of each font make this game as informative as it is addictive.

Type:Rider was created as an app for computers, tablets, and smartphones and was eventually released on gaming platform Steam. The project has also been reimagined as an interactive installation for museums and gallery spaces, using physical representations of fonts and projections of punctuation marks for a hands-on game that furthers the exploration of typography.