This year has seen the development of a new and very exciting app that allows you to create, manipulate and stylise your very own bespoke typeface. Prototypo is one of the first web apps allowing you to create such typefaces, bending them to your will, playing and experimenting with a variety of different elements that make up a font. It also gives the user the ability to export the font to be used everywhere (desktop applications, websites etc). After choosing one of the four templates available (designed by the international foundry Production Type) users can design their own font by moving over 30 sliders (x-height, curves of the serifs, width…). The changes apply live on each character of the Latin alphabet too!
The intense sense of customisation is inspiring, how we’ve come from a limited range of typefaces due to restrictions in technology to this total freedom of adaption is incredible. Thanks to its “Glyphs individualisation” and “Manual editing” features, the app gives its customer such liberation to create fully functioning fonts without using difficult software.
You wonder how such an outstanding technology works. Well based on the parametric fonts technology that uses algorithms to generate letters, Prototypo automates the repetitive tasks specific to type design. Beyond its primarily “web-app use”, Prototypo’s engine has an infinite range of applications. Think shop windows that react according to the movements of passers-by.
Prototypo was created in May 2013 in Lyon — France. By gathering a team of experts in type, graphic design and code, its unique font creation service is used by more than 35K designers coming from over 130 countries.
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