Benedikt Gross, a data visualization designer, and Joey Lee, a geographer, spend a lot of time looking at satellite imagery. The duo met at MIT’s Senseable City Lab a few years ago and after realizing their mutual enthusiasm for maps—or, more exactly, strange patterns in the Earth’s surface—decided to collaborate on a dataset called The Big Atlas of LA Pools, inspired by the many shapes of pools in Los Angeles.

Gross and Lee are now onto their new project, Aerial Bold. Once completed, it will be a typeface created from shapes and patterns from the planet’s topology, and made available to designers. Whereas The Big Atlas of LA Pools began as a mission to compare pools per capita with other datasets (like neighborhood crime), Aerial Bold was born from a few errant observations. “Basically we spend so much time looking at satellite images, that we realized there are some letters in them,” Gross says. As is often the case with noticing an oddity for the first time, once they saw a few letters, “suddenly letters were all over the place.”

Benedikt Gross, Joey Lee

In order to turn “topography into typology,” like the duo’s successfully-funded Kickstarter campaign says they will, Gross and Lee had to create a bespoke automated process to detect letter forms from aerial imagery. During the Los Angeles pools project they outsourced the data collection to a company in India. Now, Gross says, with “two more years under my belt and new knowledge about machine learning,” they’re working out a system for identifying the letterforms themselves.

First, they synthesize satellite imagery and prep it so an algorithm can read it. This involves cranking up the contrast and blocking out distinct shapes in red. Their software can read those blocks of color and extract letters. So far Gross and Lee have scanned images of Germany, Turkey, Paris, Denmark, Switzerland, California, and New York. Gross says that letters made mostly of right angles, like I and H, have shown up most frequently.

“Letters that are geometric are all over the place, but a building shaped like a V is not so common," he says. "A building shaped like a P is not so common either."

Besides creating the promised font out of satellite images, Gross says Aerial Bold could have any number of creative uses for artists. He and Lee have been approached by publishers interested in flipping the typology into a children’s book on the ABCs—something that Gross mentions could live in a digital format. They also want to share their image-detection methods with the public.

But ultimately, given the pair’s status as a couple of map geeks, much of this is data for the sake of data. They'd love to get more specific data sets—the alphabet just made up of buildings within Germany, say. “If possible we would love to do this for the entire world,” Gross says.