From the founder:

I have been thinking about what my treatment of fonts in 3D is actually inspired by. Not just aesthetically, but structurally. The answer is not a single designer, and it is not ordinary game UI typography either. It sits somewhere between OCR-era machine typography, Wim Crouwel’s system-bound logic, terminal display culture, and my own tendency to treat symbols as spatial objects rather than flat overlays. 

Most digital text systems begin with a different assumption. They start from the idea that a font is already complete: a finished outline, a texture atlas, a rasterized asset, something to be displayed faithfully. My instinct has been almost the reverse. I keep gravitating toward the idea that a glyph can be re-understood as structure. A letter is not merely an image. It is a bounded arrangement of stems, bars, boxes, spans, alignments, and internal tensions that can be reconstructed inside a constrained display regime. That is the real center of gravity of what I am doing. 

This is why the closest historical reference is probably Wim Crouwel, especially the logic behind New Alphabet. What matters there is not the superficial look of the forms, but the underlying proposition: typography should acknowledge the truth of the system it is rendered through. If the display is coarse, segmented, gridded, electronically constrained, then the letterform should emerge from those constraints rather than pretending they do not exist. My own work follows a similar instinct. I do not want the rendering surface to disappear. I want the surface to participate in the letter. 

That same logic connects to OCR typography. OCR-A and related machine-legible forms are not interesting merely because they look technical. They are interesting because they were designed under pressure from recognition, discreteness, ambiguity reduction, and reproducibility. They assume that symbols must survive transmission through imperfect systems. That assumption resonates strongly with how I think about display and computation more broadly. In my code, OCR-family fonts are not incidental; they appear directly in the font path search and in the visual orientation of the whole prototype. They act as a kind of anchor for a machine-facing typographic sensibility. 

But there is another lineage here too: terminal culture. The terminal has always treated text as both language and geometry. A character occupies a cell. The cell has a background and foreground. The screen is a disciplined field, not an infinitely smooth canvas. In my renderer, that logic is explicit. There is a GlyphRaster, a GlyphCell, a TerminalPane, scanline overlays, visible grid logic, scrollbars, pane boundaries, and a deliberate cell-first organization of the display. This is not an incidental UI wrapper around text. The raster is the world the glyph lives in. 

That point matters because my interest is not in “pretty text in 3D.” It is in making text behave like a real participant in spatial computation. In the current prototype, glyphs are not just drawn flat; they are fit into bounded boxes, sometimes across a two-box vertical span, and then the entire terminal pane can be tilted as a physical plane in perspective. The effect is simple but important: the text ceases to be an annotation floating above the system and becomes part of the system’s actual geometry. 

This is where the work departs from ordinary font rendering and becomes something else. In standard rendering pipelines, a glyph is often just bitmap coverage sampled into quads, or an SDF representation scaled cleanly across resolutions. I do some of that too, but the more revealing part of the code is elsewhere: I decompose glyphs into primitives and fit them into higher-level structural models. There is a ProceduralGlyph built from VerticalBox, HorizontalBox, and DiagonalBox. There is also a TwoStemGlyph model with left and right stems, top, middle, and bottom bars, caps, and a single-stem center mode. Those are not just rendering tricks. They reveal the conceptual move: the glyph is being reinterpreted as a small architectural system. 

That architectural treatment is probably the most accurate way to describe the whole thing. I am not really treating letters as images. I am treating them as built forms. A capital “H” is not a stored asset; it is two vertical supports and a crossbar. A “T” is a top span and a centered stem. An “E” is a left stem with three bars. Once you start thinking that way, the font becomes less like ink and more like construction. It becomes closer to world logic. 

There is a faint echo here of Susan Kare as well, though in a very specific sense. Not in style, and not because I am trying to make Macintosh-like icons, but because of the discipline of respecting low-level display reality. Kare’s work understood that discrete pixels are not a limitation to be hidden; they are a medium to be composed with. In that sense, the affinity is real. The glyph has to work under constraint. Clarity is achieved by structure, not by ornamental excess. 

Still, even that set of references is incomplete. The strongest influence may simply be the broader worldview I have been building through Procedura. In that worldview, symbols are rarely inert. They are states, transitions, containers, surfaces, anchored artifacts. I tend to think in terms of bounded spaces, local rules, scaffolded representations, and decomposable systems. So when I approach typography, I do not naturally see “font rendering” as a solved frontend problem. I see an opportunity to recover symbolic form from within a spatial regime. The letter becomes another object that can be reconstructed from the logic of the environment it inhabits. 

This is why the result does not feel quite like conventional retro typography, and it also does not feel like modern vector typography. It is retro in its respect for grids, terminals, OCR logic, and scanline-era materiality. It is modern in that it lives in an OpenGL plane, in a 3D transform, inside a larger computational environment. But it is really neither. It is trying to do something more specific: to make text native to a spatially organized computational head. 

So if I had to summarize the inspiration cleanly, I would say this: my treatment of fonts in 3D is inspired by OCR-era machine legibility, Crouwel’s system-constrained typographic reasoning, terminal raster culture, and a Procedura-style habit of treating every symbolic artifact as something that can be rebuilt from spatial primitives. 

In other words, I am not trying to place fonts into 3D. I am trying to discover what fonts become when they are allowed to belong there.