Bored of my own fonts

August to September 2025, 48 hours of build with Sahil on the ML: about 100 prompts over one weekend. 2,141 fonts hung in one navigable space. Live with issues; no V2.

I got bored of my own fonts. So I built a machine that finds new ones over the weekend.

Timeline: 48 hours, 2026
Mine: The SVG-export plugin, the entire visible build, the copy, the video
Sahil Girhepuje: Both ML models, the repo
Result: 2,141 fonts in one navigable space

Every project ended in Helvetica again. I wanted something that felt like Helvetica but wasn’t, and there was no way to search for a feeling. So Sahil and I took a weekend to build one.

A machine needs a definition of a font first

The research said “how a font feels” could only be crowdsourced. We measured instead: every letterform compressed into numbers, every font pinned to a coordinate, lookalikes landing next to each other. A visual definition, for visual designers. Sahil trained the model; I built everything you can see, about 100 prompts in.

The live product’s Font Details panel for Droid Serif — the letter A, its position coordinates in the 3D universe, and a row of its most similar fonts — beside the universe controls: font search, size slider, grid and particle toggles, camera position — How the machine sees a font — an “A”, a coordinate, its nearest neighbors — and the controls you fly the universe with.

Six capital A’s from different fonts on the top row, and underneath, the same six letters rebuilt by the model from its own compressed description of them — Top row, the real letter. Bottom row, the same letter drawn back out of the numbers the model kept.

Six harder capital A’s including an inline face, a rounded face and a display face, with the model’s reconstruction of each underneath — The awkward ones. Where the rebuild goes soft is where the measurement stops caring, and that is exactly what puts two fonts near each other on the map.

about a hundred prompts. i kept the ones that argued back.

The universe

Now you can fly to Helvetica and meet its neighbors. 2,141 fonts, arranged by feel, built in 48 hours. Live, a little wonky, finished on purpose.

2,141fonts mapped

48 hstart to live

~100prompts to build it

Fontify: 2,141 fonts hung in one navigable space, lookalikes hanging together. Fly to Helvetica and its neighbors introduce themselves. walkthrough thumbnail — Fontify: 2,141 fonts hung in one navigable space, lookalikes hanging together. Fly to Helvetica and its neighbors introduce themselves.

still a bit wonky. shipping it wonky was the point.