PN.26.024. Type. Studio project, 2026.
Shutter
A real, installable typeface drawn entirely in code. Fat blocks with counters no wider than a blade, ending in a pinhole.
The brief
Give the studio a display face of its own, and make it a real font file.
The idea
A camera shutter is a blade that lets in light. Shutter treats a letter the same way: start with a solid block and cut only what is needed for it to be read. The result is a heavy texture at a distance, and at close range each letter has one small bright eye.
Decisions
- One blade width across the alphabet, so the colour of a line stays even.
- Pinholes finish every cut, which stops the blocks reading as stencils.
- Round and square corners are chosen per letter, for rhythm across a word.
- It is the display face of this website.
How it came together
- Wrote primitives for blocks, slits and pinholes, then defined each glyph with boolean cuts.
- Rendered a specimen, then corrected spacing and redrew the ampersand.
- Compiled to OpenType and WOFF2, and built a live tester.
How it works
A script builds every glyph with paper.js boolean operations, converts the outlines to font paths, and writes a real CFF OpenType file with opentype.js.
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