Teranoptia Playground

Thursday, May 2nd, 2024

This morning, I came across something pretty cool on Hacker News. Teranoptia is a font which lets you create little monsters.

Here's a more artful description, from the Teranoptia font page:

Teranoptia is a typeface without letters, a peculiar contraption that allows you to imagine chimeric creatures just by typing letters with your keyboard. Its design has been inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry and by medieval illustrations, as well as by children's books. You can use it to create border ornaments, to daydream about monsters or just to spice your layouts with marginalia.

This font is super fun to play with. Just look at this little guy!

abccbd

Or this weirdo:

CDJccV

Or these two pals:

AGTB afgh

The possibilities are endless!

Of course, for maximal experimentation potential, I wanted a quick and easy way to try out the font. I could have just downloaded it and loaded up Pages or something, but I thought it would be cool to build a little playground that I could host on the site.

So, without further ado, here's a textbox with the font loaded. Have fun creating little critters!

Your creature's secret name is:

I created a little cheat sheet, which works best if you open it in another window so you can see all your options as you play with the text box here.

I've had a ton of fun playing around with this so far. Major props to Ariel Martin Peréz and to Tunera for making this font openly available. You can read more about the font and download it from the Tunera Type Foundry website. And if you like it, consider throwing a few bucks in Ariel's general direction.

See you next time!

afcu - , - FXUZ