About the atelier

We are engineers who happen to work in letters.

GlyphNode Studio was founded in 2015 to take on the type work that studios pass over: 20,000-glyph Chinese families, kerning repair across four scripts, and variable font builds that have to survive a production pipeline.

Aa
Two type engineers reviewing kerning pairs on a monitor in a bright studio

What we do not do

We do not design logos, brand systems, decks, or websites. We do not sell retail display fonts. When a project needs identity design, we say so and step aside.

What remains is narrow on purpose: the construction, correction, and compilation of typefaces, and the tooling that keeps them buildable after we leave.

Principles

Four commitments we hold to.

Measure before opinion

Every claim about a typeface is testable. We open the binary, render the pairs, and put numbers on the problem before proposing a change.

Sources are the deliverable

You receive UFO sources, designspace files, and build scripts. A font you cannot rebuild is a font you do not own.

Write it down

Stroke systems, component rules, and axis decisions live in a written specification your next engineer can read.

Small and senior

Nine people. No account layer between you and the engineer holding your outlines.

Who is in the room

Three CJK type designers, two Latin specialists, two font toolchain developers, a rasterization engineer, and a project lead. Everyone reads type, and everyone reads code.

Talk to an engineer
Printed specimen sheets of Chinese and Latin alphabets lit by warm afternoon light