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Bark, with a bold type: The font that grew on a tree

ByNatasha Rego
Aug 12, 2023 04:11 PM IST

Danish designer Bjørn Karmann collaborated with a beech tree to create a new font. It yielded intriguing insight into how a tree grows and heals

There’s a new experimental typeface in the world of typography, and it was grown on a tree. We’ll explain.

The tree on which Bjørn Karmann carved the Danish Alphabet. He was careful to leave portions of the bark undisturbed, so that the tree could carry on its processes undisturbed. (Bjørn Karmann) PREMIUM
The tree on which Bjørn Karmann carved the Danish Alphabet. He was careful to leave portions of the bark undisturbed, so that the tree could carry on its processes undisturbed. (Bjørn Karmann)

In 2016, Danish designer Bjørn Karmann, carved out the 29 letters of the Danish Alphabet (26 from English and three additional Danish ones), onto the bark of a beech tree. He chose a geometric sans-serif font family by Laurenz Brunner, “though as I used tracing paper to transfer the font on to the tree, it had already begun its first journey of change,” he says.

Then he stood back and watched. Over the next five years, he returned to the tree every year, to observe and document what had happened to his carvings.

What he found was fascinating. As the tree grew, it also healed its wounds and left scars, but not in a way that Karmann, 31, could have predicted. Instead of growing uniformly in all directions, as the bark of the tree expanded with time, so did width of the letters. It was like the tree had wielded a calligraphy pen of its own, thickening sides, thinning out edges, nearly obliterating the characteristic holes in its e, g, d, b, a, among others.

As the tree grew, the letters thickened, altering edges and reducing gaps between characteristic extensions and holes. (Bjørn Karmann)
As the tree grew, the letters thickened, altering edges and reducing gaps between characteristic extensions and holes. (Bjørn Karmann)

“In the beginning, my interest was purely around typography and time. But as the project progressed, and the tree started designing something I could never had thought of, I started feeling less part of the design and more of an observer,” says Karmann. “I was essentially becoming a collaborator. It made me think a lot about creation alongside nature.”

Karmann carried out this experiment in the beech forest in Ågård in central Denmark. It’s where he grew up and his parents still live. In fact, his parents planted the forest on grass fields over 20 years ago, and where he and his mother Ulla Karmann have created a few nature art installations.

Karmann started experimenting with time and typography while pursuing his Bachelor’s degree in communications design at the Kolding Design School. “I was interested in how you could use type as a tool to illustrate and express the elusiveness of time,” says Karmann who also has a Master’s from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.

In his spare time, he started making letters out of materials that would decay and disappear. Early experiments included snow, leaves and mushrooms. “They had a short transformation time from minutes to days. So naturally, I started wondering about years of slow natural transformations and decided on a tree in my parents’ forest.”

Karmann returned to the tree every year for five years, to document the letters using a camera and measuring tools.
Karmann returned to the tree every year for five years, to document the letters using a camera and measuring tools.

In his new role as the middleman and interpreter between the tree and the design community, Karmann has digitised his observations and created a new, progressive, and experimental font. He calls it Occlusion Grotesque (it’s available for free download on his website: https://bjoernkarmann.dk/occlusion-grotesque)

Artists and designers have long been using nature as a collaborator. Artist Hannah Fletcher collaborates with natural materials to explore how analog photography can be done sustainably. For instance, she used mushrooms to make a book on camera-less photography.

Regenerative artist Edward creates massive works on beach sand, only for it to be washed away when the tide comes in. The artist Simon Beck does something similar but with snow. Such pieces become even more relevant now, with as the human population deals with a worsening climate crisis.

Hannah Fletcher, founder of The Sustainable Darkroom, and “moist media” collective Akyute, both of whom experiment and collaborate with plants and organic matter in practices that integrate science, art, nature and technology.

For the next phase of this project, Karmann is working on numbers and symbols, which are missing from the current glyph set. He also wants to take it further to see how the morphing letters can help in the study of how plants heal and trees grow.

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