Jonathan Hoefler—one of the best known typographers out there—has designed a new typeface: Obsidian. The 3-D, ornamental font harks back to the days of copper plate engraving, but it's absolutely a product of computers and algorithms.

"We had the idea of doing a typeface inspired by these kinds of exuberant ornamented things that you see on old maps," Hoefler says. But, “how can you do a typeface that is ornamented and exuberant, that still feels current?”

An ornamental font like this could take over a year to get right. So Hoefler and senior designer Andy Clymer solved for this by creating custom algorithms that could help. Obsidian is created in a virtual environment that can simulate light falling on any 3-D character in the set, thus eliminating the need to draw tens of thousands of shadows, one by one.

These two ampersands show two distinct ways that letters can be illuminated—an option that would have painstaking to produce without Hoefler and Clymer's new digital tools.

All typefaces are created in type design software, where letters and numbers show up as coordinates that can be tweaked in infinitesimal ways.

That challenges becomes multiplied for ornamental types. The more ornate the character, the more plot coordinates exist.

As much as Obsidian was inspired by Victorian-era letters, it's a product of the digital age. It doesn’t have hand-shaded gradients indicating a third dimension; it has carefully placed pixels.