Below the deep, blue, cerulean abyss of Internet Explorer 9 lies a forgotten city wrapped in a glass bubble of HTML5 and CSS3. A lost civilization, which is a part of a creative project dubbed “Operation Condor,” by the design collaboration aliased “The Friends of Mighty” (JasonSantaMaria).
The City of Atlantis is the second in a series of three web typography broadsheets created by Jason Santa Maria, Frank Chimero, Naz Hamid, and Trent Walton, publicizing the Lost World’s Fairs that never were. In 1924, El Dorado, the lost city of gold, hosted the first fair of its kind in which much of the Western World’s riches were flaunted. In 1962, the underwater kingdom of Atlantis illuminated the future of aquatics for humankind. Now, to be attended in the year 2040, the future of the earth will be unveiled on the Moon (WeightShift).
This web-type exhibition surfaced as an open-ended, creative brief financed by Microsoft in order to showcase “The Beauty of the Web” through the use of typography. Thanks to IE9 and its adaptation of the font format Web Open Font Format (WOFF), there are a new breadth of web-based fonts available for use on the Internet (BeautyoftheWeb).
You can learn more about the series, including the project overview, designer profiles and each World’s Fair type colophon at LostWorldsFairs.com.
