New font editor announcement: nibfont, seeking feedback

johnnydamacha

Hi typedrawers! My name is John and I’ve been building nibfont, a browser-based font editor with realtime collaboration, as a personal side project. It's free to use and doesn't require an email to start using. I am seeking the esteemed feedback of the typedrawers community.

link: nibfont.com

video demo: link (not on youtube/social media, just hosted on cloudflare)

⚠️ this software is beta, there are probably lots of bugs.

More info:

As I mentioned, it's an app for designing fonts directly in your browser, with collaboration features similar to figma, such as realtime sync + cursor chat, all on an infinite canvas.

I understand there are existing type editors out there trying to do similar things in the browser. Those projects are very cool, but I'm taking a different approach: nibfont builds on modern design software paradigms (hence the figma inspiration). I want to make type design more accessible to adjacent disciplines such as graphic design and software engineering. Making fonts is, tbh, complex. My hope is for nibfont to make it easier for beginners and non-specialist type designers *in addition to* existing type designers.

Other features:

- Reusable components for diacritics, etc.

- Spiro tool similar to fontforge

- AI glyph generation using Quiver's SOTA vector generation model

- Live text previews and kerning directly on the canvas

- Fine-grained Bézier editing, including tangent-locked moves

- Adjustable sidebearings, font metrics, and overshoot guides

- Import font, import images into the canvas

I would love some feedback from people who actually design type before I pour any more time & tokens into the project. 

Would this be something you'd actually use? Do I have all of the paradigms & type design concepts right? Does this design conflict with how you design type in the real world? Is it worth further exploring AI-backed features for font production?

🤙 thank you