heikki

Last Notes

2026-07-29 21:42:18 UTC

Working on a new editor (again)! This one simulates letterpress where you make digital layouts with cut-outs from old scanned type specimens, all in type size so the images could be recreated in with real type on real letterpress! It supports all point sizes and shapes, so it's not restricted to square shapes.
This image is made with ornaments from the 1880 Fonderie typographique Gustave Mayeur type specimen, using type ornament I call "ivy combination".
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/117/005/439/537/825/932/original/b305dad8040c7167.mp4

2026-07-03 16:41:41 UTC

New tool: POLYARC DRAW is free online vector graphics drawing tool based on my research on polycentric arcs. I've also included around 1300 old school textures that you can drag&drop onto shapes!
https://hlnet.neocities.org/polyarc-draw/
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/857/024/433/166/876/original/3110b38683e0795e.png

2026-06-15 13:36:45 UTC

My pre-ASCII art / pictorial typography / text art archive site is out now!
People have been making ASCII-like text art on letterpress for over 300 years, building pictures entirely out of metal type, ornaments, and rule. The practice has often been dismissed as "tasteless", "wasted effort" and "nothing to do with art", which is why I think it's gone largely undocumented. So, I've spent the last 8+ years collecting ~2500 of these works into an archive. Thanks to @nprofile…qvgn, who developed the site, it's now online for everyone to browse:
https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/
or read more about it at https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?essay
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/754/347/415/594/151/original/c547f39db2ccd4b1.webp

2026-06-08 07:49:38 UTC

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@nprofile…lwfy
For a spatial writing tool I made I'm using a little calibration widget (bottom right) where the user is asked to match a reference (like a5 sheet or credit card) to a rect on screen using a slider. Couldn't figure out any other way... https://hlnet.neocities.org/il-verse/

2026-01-16 15:52:32 UTC

Added animation, timelapse and red color today!
https://hlnet.neocities.org/il-verse/
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/905/577/091/877/221/original/0d48852ff71a90ab.mp4

2025-12-03 18:40:01 UTC

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@nprofile…l8pm
Yeah, but the indesign scripting docs are so bad that its very unpractical.

2025-12-03 14:31:31 UTC

I'm listing things InDesign can't do. What am I missing?
1. Cascading font size e.g. down from 60pt to 10pt on first line.
2. Run-on paragraph with 2em space on both sides of the line.
3. NLP stuff like: bold every first syllable, or make every verb italic.
4. Rotate characters.
5. Custom paragraph composer
6. Extra spacing glue after sentence ends (so, space after periods could grow more than word spaces)
7. Any kind of parametric styling, like increase word weight each time it appears

2025-11-12 09:04:32 UTC

Accidentally discovered a flood fill based cellular automata while making a simple paint app.
I animated the flood fill (inspired by Mario Paint), so on click it slowly starts flooding in all four directions. But, when I placed two floods close together, they started colliding into each other, forming very organic looking patterns that ripple and shift. It's semi-stable: they can go for thousands of generations before eventually one floods "wins". Maybe some configurations are even stable?
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/535/914/898/117/127/original/95193f48c62cfa14.png
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/535/915/448/219/368/original/fedd7f26c0289797.png
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/535/916/987/104/246/original/3ea493e8f5d2e223.png
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/535/917/678/729/100/original/aac6d08b90fcba57.png

2025-10-20 10:17:58 UTC

My first project as the resident artist at the Centre for Text Margins is out:
https://hlnet.neocities.org/ascii-automata/
ASCII AUTOMATA is a tool to analyze the visual connectivity of characters in textmode fonts. It works by scoring edge connectivity of each piece and finding the best matching neighbour piece. Every time it places a piece, it "grows" towards the edges it touches by placing a matching piece. The red heatmap shows how frequently each character is used, useful for analyzing the fonts.
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/405/977/764/624/257/original/5c80755f8a8c426f.png

2025-08-24 18:25:07 UTC

A print created 100% using my new editor. It's a font renderer, a font editor and a simple layout system all in one. The fonts are made using three commands: moveTo, lineTo and conicTo, which is like quadratic Bezier but with an additional "sharpness" parameter. The layout system has optical kerning and a rag/justification line breaking system which rags the text, but if the line is almost to the edge, it tries to "squeeze it in". The font in the image is made in the editor within an afternoon.
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/085/137/951/600/114/original/70eaced923aca999.jpg

2025-04-13 16:23:09 UTC

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@nprofile…cfuw
Wow thank you for these words! Warms my heart. I did put a lot of effort into it, so I'm happy you noticed.

2025-04-10 08:27:00 UTC

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There's a great video, "The Mark of Man", showing how it was used in a high-speed S-C 4020 printer in 1963.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb-IaGFLz0w

2025-04-10 08:24:55 UTC

More weird old tech. This is the Charactron, originally patented in 1954, and used throughout 1960s. It was an another obscure CRT tech, in which characters were created by shooting beams of electrons *through* a stencilled metal plate with alphanumeric symbols. As the beam passed through the character matrix, it took the shape of the character it passed through, and displayed it on the screen.
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/312/642/173/069/654/original/aa5a3c44c3a444a8.jpg
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/312/642/805/347/148/original/5e9fa2c1fdf0f595.png
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/312/645/691/522/414/original/d781b61cd837af32.png
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/312/645/906/049/145/original/01419f7cc652d167.jpg

2025-02-03 20:55:45 UTC

A recent experiment. I made an "ascii automata" which on click places a random glyph, then analyzes if the character "touches" any of the glyph edges, then places another random character which continues the edge connection, and so forth, until it places a character that doesn't touch any edges. I made it so that you can mix and match different character sets from the dropdown menu (or load your own as png).
You can play with it at:
https://hlnet.neocities.org/ascii-automata/
#ascii #textmode #asciiart #PixelArt
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/941/938/445/455/789/original/f88adb3891e8e5bd.png