MIP arises from a typography workshop conducted in June 2022 with Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE) exploring the entwined ideas and politics of mapping and typography. Together, participants derived letters from map tracings, favouring unfamiliar types of maps which represent/enact characteristics of place beyond the built environment.

Through drawing this collective typeface, we made space for a slow conversation which considered: the possibilities and limitations of representing place in typography; the colonial histories and violence of writing systems and mapping systems on this continent (on/between/through Kaurna and Wurundjeri land); the assumptive premises and implications of legibility; and collective approaches to typeface-making.

Maps are documents which necessarily reduce information through omission or abstraction. The name MIP is an acronym of the Latin phrase Multum In Parvo, meaning ‘much in a little’. The acronym has previously been used in the term ‘MIP-mapping’, a texture filtering process in computer graphics. 

A curated selection of readings and references informing the workshop discussion are collected in this are.na channel.

MIP is free and open source under the SIL Open Font License.