Two typefaces from 2010, handed to their audience. Every visit changes them for good.
Isolation and Transmission were drawn in 2010 for Dazed & Confused, where they ran as the magazine’s display face for a year under the creative direction of Christopher Simmonds.
Loss of Control turns them into donor fonts for a collective generative experiment. Every letter has been redrawn as a set number of nodes, 100 in Isolation and 250 in Transmission: the points drawn in 2010, plus more split exactly along the curves between them. Every visit to the site changes some of them, and nothing is ever put back.
There is one live copy of each font. A Cloudflare Worker takes each visit, makes the change and rebuilds the letters, so everyone, everywhere, sees the same fonts, shaped by everyone who came before.
In use · Dazed & Confused, 2010–2011
Two ways to lose control
Isolation loses
Each visit deletes nodes and the outline closes over the gap. How many depends on the visitor’s connection: an ultra-fast one, under 20 ms, takes three neighbouring nodes; a fast one, under 60 ms, takes two; anything slower takes one. A contour left with fewer than three nodes becomes dots, then nothing.
Transmission moves
Each visit moves one node 10 units towards London, where the typefaces were made, from wherever the visitor is, and everything within 30 units goes with it. Nothing is lost. Over time the letters lean towards home, a map of where their audience came from.
How it works
Each family lives in a Cloudflare Durable Object, so visits arrive one at a time and no two can ever collide. A visit picks a letter at random, makes its change in every style and moves the font on an edition.
Letters are rebuilt on request as single-glyph font files, each named for its version. Once built, a version never changes, so it is cached at the edge for good and only a changed letter is ever rebuilt.
The Worker reads what the visit brings: Cloudflare’s measure of the connection and a rough location. Both are used once and never stored. A random id in a cookie allows three goes a day; after that, the site shows the visitor their last change and asks them to give someone else a chance.
Any edition can be downloaded as an artifact under the Loss of Control Artifact Licence: for keeping and personal experiments, not for commercial work. Agreeing and downloading accepts it.
Facts
- Drivers
- Visits, Connection Speed, Location
- Runs on
- Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects
- Nodes
- 100 per letter in Isolation, 250 in Transmission, matched across weights
- Styles
- Isolation and Transmission
- Drawn
- 2010
- Live since
- 2026
Credits
- Type design
- Daniel Powell
- Creative direction, 2010
- Christopher Simmonds
- Client, 2010
- Dazed & Confused
- Live system
- Daniel Powell