Around the uncountable possible concepts of design spaces imaginable, Gerrit Noordzij’s theory – visualized in the form of the Noordzij Cube – plays a prominent role in the teaching of type design, when addressing the western writing model. In addition to available resources and texts by Noordzij himself – we wanted to give our students a small, user-friendly visual tool to make the theoretical concept better comprehensible. For this we came up with the idea to translate the visual representation of the Noordzij Cube in a virtual 3D space – accessible via the web browser.
You can look at this virtual Noordzij cube from all sides, move it around or slice through its different layers. For now, this is it! But, we wanted to share it – as it can be helpful to other type design students – and are curious if and how this tool could be extended, developed and made further productive by experimenting with it. For setting up your own cube refer to the documented process here.
If you find bugs, please report them via GitHub, so we can fix them.
Colophon
The “Virtual Noordzij Cube” is an educational type design project developed and published by Prof. Pierre Pané-Farré and Simon Thiefes at the design department of the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg. Simon Thiefes took responsibility for the coding.