Title: Lineto.com
Type: Website
Date: 2003 - 2004

Lineto is a loose network of currently 21 graphic designers from around the globe.

The website Lineto.com connects them by showing a selection of their design work, and by making their type- and design-related prodcuts publicly available, creating a dynamic platform for ideas and attitudes surrounding type and graphic design.

The design of Lineto.com tries to find new and appropriate ways of presenting typefaces in the digital age. The goal was to propose an innovative, surprising, engaging, aesthetically convincing, technically sophisticated, yet simple, practical and commercially viable approach.

The key features on Lineto.com are primarily the introduction of dynamic, ever-changing type specimen using the internet as a continually growing source of text, a dynamic, fast and parametrizable type rendering engine that produces crisp GIF images of the fonts, and the use of ‘real’, meaningful texts, often with topical reference. Sample texts on Lineto.com can either be specifically authored for this purpose, written by artists, designers, writers, and other commissioned contributors, or they can be automatic selections of ‘found text’ dynamically pulled from various online sources.

The site is built like an application rather than a normal website. It features a navigation system similar to the OS X finder and a easy to use testing facility for each typeface that functions like a simple design application. The system is carefully programmed in DHTML and a AJAX-like architecture, relies heavily on JavaScript and was designed to work in a maximum of web browsers across all platforms.