Tap an offspring to make it the new parent. The last three are a wild card, a cross with an ancestor, and a stranger.
lineage — tap to go back
anatomy — the colored line is the skeleton the pen follows
Aa
Hamburgefonstiv
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow! 0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 .,:;!?-–'"()/
Type is a beautiful group of letters, not a group of beautiful letters. This paragraph is editable — write something and see how the font you just bred handles real text. It was compiled in your browser as a genuine TrueType file: tap Download and install it anywhere.
What is this?
A generative type foundry that runs entirely in your browser. Every typeface here is a genome — fourteen genes (weight, contrast, roundness, aperture, pen angle, serifs…) that feed parametric glyph skeletons. A virtual pen expands the skeletons into outlines, and letters emerge.
Evolve breeds fonts: each tile is a mutated child of the current parent. Tap what looks good; taste is the fitness function. Genes exposes the raw parameters. Specimen compiles your genome into a real TrueType file — every table written from scratch in JavaScript, no libraries — and loads it via the FontFace API, so the text you see is rendered by the browser's actual font engine. The download installs on any OS.
Font names are generated by a small grammar, a nod to ChoiceWords; the whole thing is a nod to NodeBox and opentype.js. No build step, no server: view source.
Share a font by copying its link — the genome travels in the URL.