Douglas Richard Hofstadter is a living legend and genius.
He has done work across domains but his work on the sense of self in relation to the external world is fascinating.
His book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”, published 1979, won The Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction,and The American Book Award for Science.
In the 1970s he wrote of the ‘Letter Spirit’ domain” – a region in which mysterious factors endow typefaces with personalities. Where the essence which distinguishes one letter from another becomes distilled to reveal how one ‘a’ becomes another ‘a’, or when an ‘a’ ceases being an ‘a’ – and loses its personality.
In his words :
‘… a sense of essence, in essence, is, in a sense, the essence of sense, in effect.’
His “gridfonts” are about using the most basic of grids – this particular version can generate at least 88 different versions of the letter “a”
By the way , Hofstadter’s Law is “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” The law is stated in Gödel, Escher, Bach.