Can letters be seen as shapes?

While reading an article on DOC, I came across some interesting visuals created by Manoel do Amaral.

What I found interesting about these was the fact that Manuel used an object that most of us see daily (a mouse pointer) and explored the nature of its shape. This became my starting point for the 36 Days of Type challenge in 2023: to view Latin letterforms as shapes & create graphical compositions out of them.

For each letter, I used a white Helvetica Regular glyph on a black background. 5 selected outputs for each of the 26 letters are displayed below.