"Movable type" Rubik's cube

Typophile Shaun Chung created this Rubik’s cube stamp featuring Chinese characters that combine to form verses from a traditional children’s poem. He laser-etched the characters from wood and affixed them to the cube. Shaun writes:

Chinese has a long history with the printing. In 105 AD, Cai Lun invented the paper. In 200 AD, the Chinese invention of Woodblock printing produced the worldâ€™s first print culture. In 1040, Bi Sheng invented the first known movable type technology. Therefore, I want to use a Chinese text for my cube. The text I used for my cube is called â€œThree Character Classic.â€ It is a traditional Chinese text that teaches young children to be a good person in the society. The text is written in triplets of characters for easy memorization, which is perfect for the cube since the cube is 3 by 3 on every side. The text is written by Wang Yinglin during the Song Dynasty, so I used a font called â€œSong,â€ which is correspond to the Song Dynasty when a distinctive printed style of regular script was developed.

12 thoughts on ““Movable type” Rubik’s cube”

MadRat says:

December 2nd, 2010 at 9:01 am

I’ve seen a Sudoko version of a Rubik’s cube. It shouldn’t be hard to make an English word version. I wonder why no one’s thought of that before.

Seth says:

December 2nd, 2010 at 9:53 am

But wait, AFAIK the cublets on a Rubik’s Cube rotate as you manipulate it. Won’t the poem be all topsy turvy…

Gerben says:

December 2nd, 2010 at 12:23 pm

Only the six center ones can get a different rotation. You sometimes get rubiks cubes with images on them. I find them to be a little trickier to solve. I once bought on of those, planing to print my own pictures on them. If only I had the time.