Detroit motion studio Hobbes brings carefully crafted typography to the night sky with the design and programming of their aptly named Aerial font family designed specifically for drone shows.

From the team at Hobbes: “Inspired by Futura, Aerial’s forms are balanced and geometric in nature. It varies in fidelity across three weights to accommodate a range of available drones and boasts a total of 132 flight-ready characters.

“As a part of our ongoing relationship with Firefly Drone Shows, typography emerged as a constant and tedious step in the drone choreography process. While off-the-shelf typefaces served as a powerful reference point, none accounted for the specific constraints of drone regulations or enabled us to quickly glean how many drones any particular messaging might need.

“Drones require a maintained distance of 6.5 ft between each other in order to comply with Firefly’s safety standards. For this reason, we designed Aerial with perimeters built-in, removing them later once drones were equally spaced and safely distanced.
 

While off-the-shelf typefaces served as a powerful reference point, none accounted for the specific constraints of drone regulations or enabled us to quickly glean how many drones any particular messaging might need.

 
“Design-wise, this presented a unique challenge: some letterforms translated easily to equidistant dots (such as the letter I or T), while others required creative solutions to optically appear as the letters they represented (S, W, and symbols such as the ampersand).

“Fleet size was another crucial consideration. Given different quantities of drones and an inconsistent number of characters per message, Aerial needed to be able to adapt to different levels of fidelity. Our solution was to create three font weights – one that represents the essential barebones of each letterform, one that acts as a standard middle ground, and one that is bold and expressive.

“Once the typeface was complete, our last step was to develop a method of quickly calculating the number of drones required for any given phrase in any of the three weights. The Hobbes Drone Count Utility was our solution: a simple and easy-to-use tool that determines the total number of required drones in real-time.”
 

 
Production: Hobbes
Director: Eddy Nieto
Type Designer: Josh Krauth-Harding
Producer: Tess Harris
Designer: Josh Krauth-Harding, Evan Kempinski, Eddy Nieto, Dan Stack
Animator: Nick Forshee, Josh Krauth-Harding, Evan Kempinksi, Eddy Nieto, Dan Stack, Adam Zimmer

Sound: Ambrose Yu