HandType

Sculpt Letterforms With Your Hands

Description

HandType is a gesture-controlled typography workstation that makes letterform construction feel attached to the body. Rotate an open palm like a dial to change weight, slant, width, pixel quantization, and corner radius in real time; make a peace sign and move sideways to scrub through the alphabet. Everything runs locally in the browser using MediaPipe, opentype.js, and Canvas 2D. I built it in two or three days to test whether spatial gestures could turn a slow, exacting craft into fluid visual exploration. The interface evolved from a generic cyberpunk treatment into a forensic-mechanical instrument that exposes Bézier points, grids, measurements, and active state as part of the experience.

More context

The idea began during an Apple Vision Pro demo. Reaching into space and modifying an engine directly felt closer to manipulating a material than operating software, and typography offered a precise, unforgiving material for testing whether that directness could survive outside a headset.

An open palm is the primary control. Relative wrist rotation lets the hand begin at any comfortable angle, while wrap-aware exponential smoothing removes tracking noise and prevents jumps where angles cross plus or minus 180 degrees. A peace sign switches to alphabet navigation; an early pinch-to-lock mode lasted nineteen minutes before I removed the extra state it introduced.

Opentype.js decomposes any uploaded TrueType, OpenType, or WOFF glyph into editable paths. Weight, slant, width, pixel, and corner treatments transform those paths mathematically. Pixel began as a replacement for a contrast control that damaged letterforms: snapping Bézier coordinates to a grid produced a digital-decay behavior that became my favorite discovery in the project.

The first complete interface used cyan glow, scanlines, and a generic cyberpunk vocabulary. I rejected it and rebuilt the tool as a 1970s-inspired instrument panel: warm charcoal, cream, burnt sienna, IBM Plex Mono, registration marks, dot leaders, and visible construction geometry. AI made that wrong direction cheap enough to build, judge, and discard while the original conviction was still fresh.

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JW
Justin Wetch