From calligraphy materials to font editors, customizing and extending off-the-shelf tools—and creating entirely new ones—is often key to the process of type design. It’s not uncommon for type designers to have sizeable collections of scripts and self-made digital tools to assist in their workflows.
In 2020, Netherlands-based type foundry Mass-Driver released two of these in-house tools for free: Overview, which quickly surfaces critical metadata about a font file; and Waterfall, which finds words that display at a specific width in a given typeface. Originally scripts written in Python, these tools were rebuilt to work in a web browser with a visual interface—making them accessible not just to type designers who can code, but to anyone with a font file and an internet connection.
In this presentation, Mass-Driver founder Rutherford Craze will explain how these current tools work, as well as some of the rationales behind their design and the way they’re published. He will also discuss the future of the Mass-Driver Workshop project and the possibilities for additional tools.