Every letterform is a habitat

Plating

000

A plate, nine organisms, and your letterforms as the medium.

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Letterforms are the growth medium.

Idle

Learn

Return adds a line.

Drag on the plate to paint nutrient.

Plate tool
Brush
Rate
25 min/s
  1. 01

    A letterform is a place to live.

    Give a bacterium a surface, some sugar and a temperature it likes, and it will not draw your type — it will occupy it. The glyph stops being a shape and becomes terrain: thick strokes hold food longer, counters become isolated islands, a tight join is a corridor two cells wide.

  2. 02

    Nothing here is animation.

    Every cell carries its own size, age, division count and a small genome of heritable traits. It eats on Monod kinetics, divides by adding a constant amount rather than doubling, mutates a little each time, and dies of starvation, poison or age. The shapes you get are the outcome of those rules meeting your letterforms. No frame is drawn twice.

  3. 03

    You are the environment.

    Feed a corner and the colony walks to it. Poison one and watch resistance appear in the survivors within a few generations. Raise the heat past seventy degrees and only the archaeon is left. You are not adjusting a filter; you are running a selection experiment and the plate is answering.

  4. 04

    Then take it away with you.

    Any moment of it exports: a still at four times size for a print or a wallpaper, the cells as real SVG geometry, the run as WebM, the population history as CSV. The culture is yours, and so is everything it produced.

The library Meet the nine organisms