Cloning reveals the technique behind this multi-level halftone effect. This is just one of myriad possible composite brick arrays to create awesome halftones. 2:2 cleverly allows for 4x apparent resolution. Grid height is 108 bricks.

You have to break this illustration into 9 component parts to get it to pass the fontmortar. Reassembling, then, becomes a bit of a trick. Enjoy!

@djnippa: Defo not a font...as you say, it exists for the enjoyment. In this case: pioneering brick science (though this is not nearly as replete a work as, say, your quintessential offering). Still a work in progress, I wanted to get it out to assist and inspire the UWE fsers.

The scale of the single illustration currently on tap is a bit impressive (though it is the 2:2 filter magic that takes it into the stratosphere). Also noteworthy is the diversity of bricks. Yet I was able to optimize a manual tracing routine to keep fontstructing time to about an hour. I built up each tone incrementally using a threshold adjustment layer in ps (turns out 1000% zoom renders pixels at the same scale as the fontstructor’s smallest zoom – very useful), and of course a transparent browser window (Afloat is my current choice for that).

More difficult still was getting the finished design past the fontmortar. I melted it a couple times. Humorously, the first version I managed to download turned out to be exotically corrupted (in a reproducible way) – such that it managed to crash my computer, too! LOL!

The actual creativity involved (constructing halftone brick arrays) is a rewarding premise for experimentation. I always get that feeling when I am fontstructing that I am visioning and beta-testing a much more capable future incarnation of the app. It’s just how I roll sometimes with my lust for innovation. And so I hope to yield some satisfying results and share them.

You are very right that such graphics can be crunched in minutes (versus hours) by feeding grayscale images into Photoshop/Illustrator’s various halftone generators. There are some cool shareware apps that raise the stakes further while keeping the ante quite reasonable (Vecotoraster is a personal favorite).

@meek: The conclusion of my experiments (and other published “traced” works, like so many of the UWE contributions) is as follows. It would be extremely useful to create an automatic tracing macro. This would work by first importing images into the fontstructor. The macro would then translate the raster image into discrete grayscale values (posterization) The range of grayscale values would be associated with and assigned by the cycle defined in the My Brick palette. Or, for the sake of flexibility, a special numerical signifier could be assigned via hotkey clicking on any brick in either brick palette. |The absolute value of the increments from the lightest non-white to 100% black raster values| = n will then correlate with the “halftone brick cardinality” 1 through n. Finally, each associated brick populates the matrix in accordance with the bitmap originally fed into the macro. Voilà!

The macro could be further expanded by automating the rotate command such that bricks align with an awareness of their vicinity – most simply by assigning for each brick a unit-vector that always points toward the area of greatest ink density.

Now that’s a hypothesis worthy of “brick science”! :-)

A linear, etching effect. These bricks are very straight-forward composites, though carefully modulated for tone control. 1:1 filters maintains maximum sharpness in the traced image. Simplicity also makes this private clone downloadable...