Give ten type designers the same constraint and most will find ten different ways around it. Slanted Publishers tested that idea directly with GridType, an online tool that builds letterforms from adjustable grids and stencils rather than freehand drawing. GridType Vol. 1 collects what happened when ten designers used it: ten typefaces, one shared construction method, almost no resemblance between the results.
The book is a 96-page softcover, risograph-printed by no kiss in Amsterdam, with open thread-stitching that leaves the binding visible. It presents the ten typefaces as full specimens alongside interviews about type, tools and why designers might want to build their own.
Nine grids, borrowed from a 150-year-old idea
GridType takes its cue from grid-based lettering systems like the Plaque Découpée Universelle, a single 1870s stencil that could draw an entire alphabet, along with later reference points like Wim Crouwel and the Bauhaus. The tool offers nine grid types: some geometric, built from rectangles, triangles or circles, others modeled on display technologies like pixels and seven-segment displays. Designers pick a grid, adjust parameters like row and column count, and let the constraint do some of the drawing for them.
Ten designers, ten completely different alphabets
The ten contributors, including Anna Cairns, Charlotte Rohde, Hanna Boslau, Studio HanLi, Trang Hà and Özgür Deniz Koldaş among others, took the same grid logic in directions that barely overlap. Some typefaces stay close to legible text faces built from strict rectangles. Others break into scattered dot patterns, oversized display letters, or shapes that read more as pattern than alphabet until you look twice.
The tool is as much a subject as the typefaces
The book's interviews push past the typefaces themselves into questions about tool-building generally. One conversation with type designer Céline Hurka and design studio pointer* covers Variable Time, an open-source web tool the pair built together for animating variable fonts, and what happens when a type designer and a tool developer treat their collaboration as a genuine back-and-forth rather than a client relationship.
What a shared constraint can do for a group project
GridType Vol. 1 works as a design brief disguised as a tool: pick a grid, set your parameters, and see what falls out. What makes the book worth a look isn't any single typeface but the spread between them, proof that a rigid system can still leave room for ten unrecognizable outcomes. The typefaces are available to download through the GridType website, and the book itself is available through Slanted.
