Enfont Terrible

A terrible type foundry

I love this project because it combines many of the things I care about: design, code, typography… and silly puns. enFont Terrible produces web fonts by applying several kinds of random deformations to a given typography.

How does it work?

To use this website, users can drag and drop a font file in Open Type format. The website reads the file and then allows them to interact with a sample word using three controllers that affect the text in different ways. Once the users are (extremely) happy with the deformations applied, they can download the font and install it like a regular one.

Because the deformations are applied to every symbol, instead of showing a charset map I decided to show random words and allow users to change them.

Internals

I used OpenType.js to parse the font files and generate the typography, and P5.js to animate the glyphs and render the font onto the screen.

The project runs on Node.js, and it’s hosted on Glitch, which is this cool community where you can publish code experiments and share them with other people.

Privacy

The font is generated in the browser. The original file that users drop in the website never touches the server, so they can rest assured that their original font files won’t be shared.