Instagram story viewer> @noahhouriet> Posts

noahhouriet

@noahhouriet

4.9K

followers

1067

following

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

BA Thesis (2026)

What determines the shape of a letter? Intention, or the tool that carries it out?

Letterforms never come from nothing. They emerge from an interplay between tool, material, and purpose. In Roman antiquity, the chisel in stone, the reed pen on papyrus, and the quill on parchment each set their own limits on form. Those limits shaped the writing we still read today. Form was never free; it was always the result of what a given tool could achieve on a given material.

My project grew out of an attempt to reverse this mechanism. If, in antiquity, the tool determined the form, what happens when the tool itself becomes a free variable? Material no longer limits the stroke. Any vector shape can become a tip that traces a letter along a skeleton line. Historical constraint becomes an open system.

I coded a web tool that places an input shape onto a predefined skeleton line and generates a new base typeface from it. This can then be refined further by adjusting the points of the letters' inner or outer forms.

My goal was to build a tool that lets people sketch new letterforms quickly and intuitively. The point isn't to produce a finished typeface, but to offer an easy way to explore very different approaches. Over time, a shared and growing system can emerge from a single tool, just as writing in antiquity was never the work of one person, but a collective, ever-evolving process.

Special thanks to Peter Glassen and Mauro Paolozzi for supervising my thesis.

@baviskom @hkb_bfh by @noahhouriet

3

20

3 months ago

Gradient Raster Generator (2026)
🔗 gr.noahhouriet.ch (desktop only)

For V7 I rebuilt the color sampling and the whole region system. Instead of one raster across the entire image, you can now work region by region and give each region its own gradient, cell size, direction and colors. Regions can be rectangles, freehand shapes or circles, filled either with a raster of small gradients or a single smooth one.

Radial gradients are new, and there are two ways to sample color now: Chroma takes the image colors at both ends of a cell, while Range blends from the darkest to the brightest pixel.

On top of that you can adjust hue, saturation, brightness and contrast per region or globally, switch to black & white, place regions on a solid background and move, rotate or scale them freely.

Input images from Unsplash by @noahhouriet

3

1

3 months ago

VERBA IN SAXO (2026)
I learned the basics of stone letter carving and developed a digital typeface based on stone-carved inscriptions.

Marmor 12 x 90 cm

special thanks to Josef Loretan, @hkb_werkstatt and @samiraschneuwly by @noahhouriet

3

5

9 months ago

2 Posters for @tramundbass designed by @joellejaermann + me

thanks to @tramundbass for the opportunity

October 2024 by @noahhouriet

3

8

2 years ago

bougainvillea glabra, gaussian splat polycam, capoliveri elba, juli 2024 by @noahhouriet

3

1

2 years ago

Wo sich Bilder, Skulpturen und Waffen in der Dunkelheit verstecken.

The different materials of the SKKG collection.
(SKKG Foundation for Art, Culture and History)

Editorial Design @baviskom supervised by @buero146 June 2024

Typeface: Tiempos Text @klim_type_foundry
Images: ©SKKG by @noahhouriet

3

2

2 years ago

gradient raster generator (2024)

the individual color gradients are created based on the original colors of the input image. the smaller the specified height and width of the gradient rectangles, the more accurately the image will be displayed.

input image ➡️ definition size of the rectangles and color gradient direction ➡️ generated output image by @noahhouriet

3

14

3 years ago