Showroom · Make-of

How Foundry was made

A display alphabet with no font file behind it: thirty-one stroke skeletons, three levers, and a renderer that re-inks every letter the moment a parameter moves.

What it demonstrates

That type can be an algorithm instead of an asset. Every glyph is stored as a skeleton — a few polylines and arcs in a 100-unit cap-height box — and the letterform you see is that skeleton inflated by parameters at draw time. Weight, contrast, and terminals are sliders; slant, width, and roundness reroll on Recast. Because the letters are rules rather than outlines, one click genuinely produces a new "cut", and the page says plainly what it is not: there is no .ttf, .otf, or .woff here, and nothing to install.

Techniques, honestly named

• Stroke-skeleton glyphs — A–Z plus five marks defined as point lists; bowls are arcs sampled as superellipses, so one "roundness" exponent reshapes every O, B, and S between circle and squircle.
• Disc-stamped rendering — the renderer resamples each stroke every ~2 units of arc length and stamps a filled disc into a Path2D; stamp radius is the flesh on the bone, and one fill call paints the whole line of text.
• Direction-based contrast — each sample knows its tangent, and discs shrink as strokes turn horizontal, which is the broad-nib logic that makes crossbars thinner than stems.
• Free-end terminals — ball terminals swell only at stroke ends that touch no other stroke, computed by a distance check at build time, so the apex of A and the corners of Z stay clean joins while the feet flare.
• Parameter morphing — Recast eases all six parameters to their new values over 420 ms with rAF (or snaps instantly under prefers-reduced-motion); sliders redraw directly for a hands-on feel.
• Honest scope — caps only, thirty-one sorts, and typing anything the case lacks gets a plain answer under the input instead of a substituted fake.

Recreate it