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A novel fabric made from the skeletons of decayed font gods

Project Overview: The world is hungry for new, environmentally-friendly textiles. I am uniquely skilled in preserving what we have. Together, these drives led to the creation of a completely new, only slightly eldritch textile with properties that will blow your mind.

Project Background

In 2025, during a routine examination of the Archives’ digital typography collection, I discovered something unprecedented in the piles of material to discard as waste: several obsolete typefaces had begun to physically decompose, leaving behind curious fibrous residue. What most conservators would ignore as undesirable trash, I recognized as an opportunity.

The skeletal remains of deprecated serif fonts (particularly the ill-fated Comic Sans Neue v12) displayed remarkable tensile strength and a subtle iridescence visible only under specific wavelengths of light. Further analysis revealed these “font fibers” possessed properties unlike any known textile.

Conservation Methodology

Phase 1: Material Harvesting & Stabilization

  • Careful extraction of font remnants from deprecated typeface libraries (2003-2009 era)
  • pH-neutral cleaning to remove digital artifacts and kerning residue
  • Stabilization using modified conservation techniques typically reserved for 18th-century silk
  • Material testing revealed unexpected resistance to both physical and temporal degradation
A keyboard used in the process
Note that we can have captions, e.g., a keyboard used in the process

Phase 2: Fiber Processing

  • Development of proprietary method to align glyph fibers for optimal strength
  • Integration of counter-spaces (the voids within letters) to create natural ventilation channels
  • Retention of original font characteristics: Text Tiles maintain faint readability under magnification

Phase 3: Weaving & Pattern Development

  • Created hybrid loom combining traditional Jacquard mechanisms with unicode rendering engines

Material Properties

  • Composition: 78% decomposed serif, 15% deprecated script fonts, 7% orphaned dingbats
  • Weight: 4.2 oz per square yard (remarkably lightweight)
  • Unique Characteristics:
    • Resists coffee stains (excellent ink retention properties remain)
    • Naturally antimicrobial due to residual .exe file corruption

Conservation Impact

This project demonstrates that textile conservation need not be purely preservationist. By transforming what would be digital waste into functional material, Text Tiles bridges the gap between heritage craft and technological obsolescence. The resulting fabric has been tested for use in archival storage bags (it appears to calm anxious historical textiles) and specialty conservation gloves.

Exhibition & Recognition

  • Featured in Textile Conservation Quarterly’s “You Can’t Be Serious” issue (Spring 2026)
  • Honorable Mention, International Association of Improbable Textile Science
  • Currently on display at the Museum of Questionable Fiber Arts, Brooklyn