Isoline treats a word as terrain. The letters become a plateau, fractal noise rolls around them, and contour lines are drawn through the result — thin, flowing lines that bunch tightly around each letter and drift out into the background.
Nothing is pre-rendered. Every frame is computed on the GPU in about 2–4 ms: the text is drawn, blurred into an aura, mixed with four-dimensional noise and sliced into contours. Because the noise travels on a circle through its extra dimensions, the motion loops seamlessly.
It was made for Paradigms 2026, Frontify’s brand experience summit, where it began as an After Effects treatment for the identity. It was rebuilt for the browser, where it can be typed into, steered by the cursor or driven by live sea conditions. An isoline is a line joining points of equal value on a map, the same thing each ring traces here.
In use · Paradigms 2026, Frontify’s brand experience summit
Steered by the sea
Isoline Contour
The static output. The tool's font generator runs every character of a base font through the contour treatment, traces the result and builds a font from it, keeping the base font's metrics and kerning. The animated system on paradigms.io becomes a typeface anyone can set. The original, Paradigms 2026 Contour, was traced from ABC Diatype; this version is traced from Instrument Sans, so it's released under the SIL Open Font License. All 326 characters.
Facts
- Drivers
- Time, Cursor, Live Ocean Data
- Renders with
- WebGL 2 · four shader passes
- Commissioned
- Frontify · Paradigms 2026
Credits
- Art direction & identity
- Gianluca Alla
- Tool concept & development
- Daniel Powell
- Base typeface
- ABC Diatype Medium, Dinamo
- Live demos here
- Instrument Sans
- Client
- Frontify · Paradigms 2026
- Festival website
- union union