LL Moonbase VAR
Lineto · Cornel Windlin, Weichi He · 2021
A variable font that interpolates between the crude pixel origins and rounded letter shapes of Cornel Windlin's 1991 Moonbase Alpha, the typeface used in NASA's 2021 Perseverance Mars Mission emblem.
About
Originally created by deliberately crashing the Adobe Type Manager to corrupt a PostScript rendering of Akzidenz Grotesk, Moonbase Alpha became an iconic artefact of early 1990s techno culture. Three decades later, Weichi He reversed the process, reducing the letterforms back to their square-pixel arrays while simultaneously pushing the rounded corners toward fully circular shapes, then combining both drawings into a variable font that re-enacts the typeface's origin. The axis shifts between raw pixel composition and the polished rounded version, making the production history of the face legible in real time.
Classification
Derived from a corrupted PostScript rendering of Akzidenz Grotesk, the typeface is built from square-pixel compositions with rounded corners, placing it firmly in the display category as a digitally-derived, techno-inflected face with no conventional serif or sans classification.