what you can see is a first guess — the real letters are still being drawn
before you sample
A font file works best. Drop a .ttf or .otf and
the studio fits editable skeletons to its actual letterforms — proportions,
weight and construction all come across, and every letter stays editable.
An image also works, but far less well. There are no
outlines to read, so it measures what it can from the pixels and infers the
rest. Expect the flavour, not the font. Use a tight, high-contrast crop of a
single line of text.
Either way the result is a NEW design derived from that source — not a copy,
but not unencumbered either.
You confirm you own the font, or hold a licence permitting this use.
Most commercial font licences prohibit deriving new typefaces.
Check yours. "I found it online" is not a licence.
Names and trademarks are not sampled. Your design is auto-named
independently and you should keep it that way.
What you make is yours, and the responsibility for the source is too.
type ryder – an intuitive typeface studio for everyone
Every letter is generated from a skeleton and a set of axes — weight, width,
slant, roundness, contrast, x-height. Move one handle and the whole alphabet
redraws.
Describe a style in words, roll the dice, or import a real font and keep
editing its letterforms as live skeletons. Reshape one letter and project
that gesture onto every other.
Fonts export as an installable .otf with optical kerning. $10
once, per font, with a licence for unlimited commercial and personal
use.
Best on a desktop — it's a dragging tool, and a mouse beats a fingertip.
A phone is the better place to roll the dice and describe a vibe.
Prompts are stored with the design they produced, so the next
person who types the same words gets it instantly. The phrase and the result
only — never your identity, device or address.
Questions, licensing, or something drawing wrong — hi@typeryder.com.
The big letter is the whole alphabet. Every control changes all of it — drag
a red handle on the canvas, or drag sideways on any chip in the toolbar.
Double-click a chip to reset that axis.
change parameters
Each chip is one axis: press and drag sideways to scrub it, double-click to
reset it. The four handles on the canvas — weight, width, slant,
round — are the same values as their chips.
The rest are the ones type designers argue about. Contrast thins the
horizontals toward hairlines; stress rotates the angle that happens on.
Tension runs round to squared-off, aperture opens or closes the
terminals on c, e and s, and x-height sizes the lowercase body. On a narrow
screen they sit behind tune ».
Nothing is destructive — undo steps back through everything, and clicking
the TR logo resets the design.
Try describing a style/mood/vibe in the top field — "elegant", "80s arcade",
"wanted poster" — and the design changes to match. Roll the dice for a random one.
Crazy mode unlocks every axis to ten times its range in both directions;
things get unhinged, which is the point.
Style changes construction rather than proportion: stencil, shadow, pixel
and blackletter are genuinely different letterforms, not effects. Genre does
the same for serifs.
one letter at a time
Click any letter in the grid to work on it. Points shows its skeleton —
drag a node to reshape that letter, double-click a node to remove it.
Apply to all repeats the gesture on every other letter. Reset
letter undoes the current letter; clear edits drops every
per-letter override.
sampling a real font
Point sample a font at a .ttf or .otf and type ryder
measures its letterforms and fits editable skeletons to them, so you can keep
designing from where that face left off. It takes a minute or two, and letters
appear as they're drawn. An image works too, but far less well — with no
outlines to read it infers from pixels, and you get the flavour rather than
the font. You must have the right to use whatever you sample.
A few letters usually come back too complex to fit and are kept as the
source's exact outlines. Every axis still moves them except style —
an exact outline is finished ink, and stencil or blackletter would have
nothing to reshape. So changing style redraws those letters as
skeletons, and the whole alphabet changes together. That is a
reinterpretation rather than a reproduction, which is the honest answer the
moment you ask for a construction the original never had.
buying a font
Exports are $10, once, per font. No subscription, nothing recurring.
Sign in with an email first so the file is tied to you and can be
re-downloaded from /my any time.
The licence is complete: unlimited commercial and personal use, in as
many projects as you like — logos, print, packaging, web embedding, video,
apps, products you sell. No per-seat count, no page views, no expiry, no
attribution. You may not resell or redistribute the font file itself,
or bundle it into a template for others to reuse as a font.
You get a zip with the .otf, a specimen sheet, and the licence. Have a
discount or comp code? Enter it in the export box — the price updates before
you pay.
installing your font
Unzip first — installing from inside a zip is the usual reason it "doesn't
work". Then:
Mac — double-click the .otf and click Install Font. Quit and
reopen any app that was already running; most only read the font list at
launch.
Windows — right-click the .otf and choose Install, or
Install for all users.
iPhone / iPad — you need a font-installer app from the App Store. iOS
cannot install a font from Files on its own.
Figma — install it on your machine as above, then use the desktop app,
or the Font Helper in a browser.
Websites — upload the .otf alongside your CSS and declare it with
@font-face. Converting to .woff2 first will load faster.
If the font appears but looks wrong in one app, quit that app completely and
reopen it. Font caches are aggressive.
on a phone
Everything works, but precision suffers: dragging a single skeleton point,
reading fine differences in weight or spacing. A fingertip covers roughly the
area you're aiming at. Sampling takes a minute or two of steady work, and a
phone that sleeps mid-fit will interrupt it. Phones are good for the fun
half — describing a prompt, rolling the dice, showing someone.