Vision

This is where we are and where we are going. Have a look at our history to see where we are coming from. Take this as the bigger picture. We will have detailed roadmap documents published for shorter term goals.

Where We Are

We have three Applications to demo the state of the technology.

• Metapolator a next generation font-family authoring tool. It has a great vision and is in a minimal viable product state.
• The MOM-Developer-Tool which reveals a lot of the inner workings of Metapolator and has the potential to grow into our generic platform base.
• The Bauhaus-Emblem-Font (not online yet) Which serves three purposes:
  1. An editor for type on a circle as seen on the Bauhaus-Emblem of Oskar Schlemmer,
  2. a tech-demo for Atem and
  3. an initiation and learning tool for CPS.

Our code-base is in a good shape for the moment. It's split up into modules with clearly defined dependencies. We have solved some harder problems that occur when JavaScript is used in different environments than just the browsers, like node.js command-lines e.g. Atem-IO.

In presentations or in face-to-face dialogues, we get generally good to positively excited feedback when we show what we have.

Where we ultimately end up

The Developer-Tool type of applications will transform into a polymorphic platform. We'll have it fully customizable and most of it working via plugins. We may end up having—similar to Linux-distributions—specializations of it, particularly well fitted for a specific task. E.g. Metapolator, which is now custom made, should be built on this platform.

A core feature will always be having the setup for experimentation and exploration, without the need for polished UI and UX, to allow fast paced development.

Font-Authoring

We'll have a drawing tool, that'll allow drawing fonts with our object model from scratch. It will be a comfortable tool to work with for type designers. This will lead to a fully non-destructive workflow. I.e. when a master is changed, the changes will ripple through the instances that inherit from that master. Fixes for problematic parts after interpolation will persist and interpolation will happen continuously.

The Metapolator-Object-Model (MOM) and Cascading-Properties-Sheets (CPS) will be used as the common base. We'll have different general directions to explore parametric type design.

• One general approach is having generic elements, like our <penstroke> or other generic drawing abstractions and making these work in the parametric font. A great deal for this will be the implementation of a concept with the working title meta-components, which will make a reuse straight forward. E.g. a serif, that is made from a generic <contour> element and enhanced with custom CPS-formulae can be shared across different glyphs and may still get assigned specific overrides for each instance.
• Another general approach is using specialized elements that can be loaded as plugins. E.g. one element-type that draws only serifs, one element-type that draws only shoulders and so on.
• The third approach will be combining all other directions. The way CPS works allows us to mix and match any elements in the object model and make them work together.
• We are open for more new ideas on our journey.

New Domains

It's easy to come up with custom Object-Models based on our Object-Model-API (OMA) this entails having the fully functional CPS engine available. All the generic tools that are not specific for the MOM will be available: loading/saving, history management and the Developer-Tool platform with all the CPS-Tools come for free.

We'll work on inspiring and supporting other people to approach new domains using our tooling. The Bauhaus-Emblem-Font is an example and it should be possible to take it further into a parametric illustration tool.

We've been talking to the Valentina Project an Open Source (fashion-)pattern drafting software. It would be a blast to come up with a pattern drafting software based on the OMA, i.e. packed with <collar> elements and so on.

Conceptually, there's nothing in Atem technology limiting it to be used for non-graphical applications like audio or adding a dimension and exploring 3d modeling. But, we will have to improve our Property-Language to be up to the task.

How we get there

From here, start to explore the Project and see what we make out of our plan, or consider supporting us and collaboration if you want this vision to come true.