Type · Study 093
Alphabet Rain
Columns of serif capitals fall down the page at different speeds, each led by a red letter that keeps changing. Hover to slow a column and read it.
What you're looking at
The page is a grid. Each column has a falling head and a tail of letters behind it that fade with distance. Letters are chosen by a hash of their grid position, so a given cell shows the same character each time a stream passes, except the leading one, which is reshuffled twelve times a second.
The idea behind it
Falling text as a visual idea is older than the film that made green glyphs famous. Guillaume Apollinaire set a poem about rain in trailing, slanted lines of type in 1918. Treating characters as particles works because type is already modular: every glyph sits in the same sized box.
Try this
Move the pointer over a column to slow it and its neighbours to a fifth of their speed.
