A wordmark packed along its own medial axis

The opening needed a word that condenses out of nothing and can later slump into a handful of glass balls. A shape that has to do both cannot be a path — it has to be made of something.

Circle packing along the medial axis is the answer that was already sitting there. Take the outlines, find the set of points equidistant from two edges, and put a sphere at each one with the radius of the distance. The result is a covering of the letterform whose union under a smooth minimum is the letterform, and whose parts can be moved independently.

The blend is the part that needed care. A smooth minimum welds anything closer than its own k, and the value that is right for seven letters across six units turns a longer word into a caterpillar — so the weld is carried per word as a fraction of the stroke rather than as a constant.

It also fails in a way worth writing down: a stroke built from beads has beads in it. That is fine for a mark seen once at the top of a page and wrong for a paragraph, which is why the technologies are real extruded letters and not this.