Project Alpha
A typographic playground for letterforms in motion.
Project Alpha began as a question: what happens when you treat letterforms as physical objects rather than glyphs on a page? We built a small laboratory where visitors could stretch, warp, and rearrange type in real time, guided only by the feel of their scroll wheel.
The Craft
Under the hood, Alpha uses a single variable font with six axes and a custom WebGL shader that deforms each character mesh based on cursor velocity. Everything renders at 60fps on a mid-tier laptop without a single pre-rendered frame.
The hardest part wasn't the technology — it was knowing when to stop. Early prototypes were dazzling and unreadable. The final version restrains itself, letting the restraint become part of the composition.
What We Learned
Motion is a language, and like any language it rewards vocabulary over volume. The strongest interactions in Alpha are the ones you almost don't notice: a half-breath of easing, a ten-pixel drift, a weight that shifts by one unit as your eye passes over.