Talk about taking Google Maps to a whole new level. A geographer and designer are building a font composed entirely of images found by satellite imagery – think A-shaped buildings, factories in the shape of B, and ring roads in a perfect O.

Typographic creators Benedikt Gross and Joey Lee describe Aerial Bold as "the first map and typeface of the earth". The two are no stranger to data-heavy geography; their previous book, The Big Atlas Of LA Pools, saw them map and analyse LA swimming pools, crunching out stats such as the crime rates near manmade water holes.

Now the pair are intending to sift through all the world's satellite imagery and "read the earth" using algorithms built to observe and find the shapes of the alphabet. The end product will be a typeface that can be imported into word processing programmes to create the first font made out of the world's natural landscape.

Gross and Lee set up a Kickstarter to finance the making of the tools necessary to create Aerial Bold and have already surpassed their target of $10,000, with the highest donation of $70 granting you access to the tools, algorithms and code. Head over to help them out in cataloguing the entire planet.

Watch the two talk about their ambitious project below:

h/t Wired