Seed
One point, at the base
Every letter starts as a single red seed on the baseline. The glyph's silhouette is measured into a coverage mask — the counters of an e or an o stay hollow, because nothing is asked to grow there.
A typeface that grows
Every glyph is grown, not drawn.
Plant a word below. Each letter climbs from a single seed along a space-colonisation vein skeleton — branching toward light, thickening where it pays — until the strokes knit into finished type. Drag the axis to scrub any word from seed to bloom.
Your browser blocked the canvas. GERMINAL needs 2D canvas to grow its letters.
Seed
Bloom
01
How a letter grows
Veins
Space colonisation
Hundreds of attractors scatter inside the glyph. Each pulls the nearest tip toward it; the tip grows a short segment, the reached attractors die, and the front advances. Veins fork wherever two attractors tug in different directions.
Bloom
Thickening into type
Each vein carries the weight of everything above it — trunks widen like a real branch under Murray's law — until the swelling strokes merge and the letterform fills. Look closely at a finished glyph: its vein skeleton is still there, under the ink.
02
The growth axis
germinal
Seed
Bloom
wght—
wdth—
opsz—
GRAD—
One slider drives four of Roboto Flex's real axes at once — weight, width, optical size and grade — a synthesised super-axis we call growth. It is the same idea the canvas above renders literally: a single control that moves a shape from the barest seedling to full, watered bloom.
“We stopped drawing letters. We plant them, and read what comes up.”
GERMINAL — field notes, plot 14