“We’re very honoured that our innovation, Grammatography, got awarded with Tokyo TDC Prize for Type Design. This is very cool, because this work has been years in the making – and finally Grammato is a product which we can offer for other companies. We unveiled our long-developed grammato.com service at the ATypI 2019 conference in Tokyo. This ground breaking innovation enables a text to write on demand – that is, while retaining its semantic content, a text writes itself with a smooth animation. We call this action ‘Grammatography’”, says Underware’s type designers Akiem Helmling, Bas Jacobs and Sami Kortemäki.
To achieve this, Underware developed their own interpolation technology which allows elegant curvature (Higher Order Interpolation, HOI), own animation production tools and couple of self-writing demo fonts with a large character set. Because grammatographic text is implemented as a font, the writing animation is infinitely smooth, scalable, applicable to all digital text and capable of replicating a variety of calligraphic blades, brushes and font styles. The technique can also mimic the expansion of ink on paper, the dynamic slowing and acceleration of writing in the curves, and the pauses in writing as the pen moves. In other words, Grammato combines the best of calligraphy and typography: living writing and the reproducibility of the text.
“At its simplest, Grammato can deliver an animated logo or a slogan. But because the technology is based on standards and supports Unicode, it can be used to build a large font family with extensive language support. And then incorporate these self-writing fonts into an application’s interface, such as social media messaging services, games, operating systems, tutorials, etc. Demo videos for these different ways can be found at grammato.com”, Akiem, Bas and Sami explain with a lot of enthusiasm. “Thank you Tokyo Type Directors Club! And for others: please contact us and we’ll help to make your products write.”
