Gallery: An NSA Whiz Designs 4 Fonts to Foil Google's All-Seeing Eye
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ZXX, a typeface by designer Sang Mun, includes 4 different font styles designed to thwart optical character recognition. *Image: Sang Mun*
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The project is more of a provocation than a legit security measure, but it does work as billed. *Image: Sang Mun*
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One style adds digital noise to letters. *Image: Sang Mun*
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Another simply x's them out. *Image: Sang Mun*
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This one adds camo-style blogs to the letterforms. *Image: Sang Mun*
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And this one hides the message in tiny letters amongst larger, false text. *Image: Sang Mun*
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“Google definitely inspired me the most in developing a defiant typeface,” Mun says. *Image: Sang Mun*
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“Hearing about Google Glass—a 24/7 ubiquitous panopticon–the Google Goggles app and its new image search engine, and Google’s rigorous process of scanning every existing book … All these software algorithms are programmed to extract every bit of information out of every kind of input.” *Image: Sang Mun*
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And while its main function today might be to raise awareness, it's not entirely hard to see a future where a typeface like this might actually prove useful. *Image: Sang Mun*
