Kalimantan Is Burning and It Is Not an Accident
Look up at the sky in Kalimantan during dry season, and you will not see blue. You will see a thick, choking blanket of yellow haze that stings your eyes and burns your throat. Every single year, the rainforests (one of the vital green lungs of this planet) get turned into absolute ash. But let us cut through the official press releases and corporate speak: these fires are not natural disasters. They are industrial arson.
Typography and Resistance in Indonesia
Typography is never neutral. Every serif, every bold sans-serif stem, and every hastily sprayed stencil carries an ideological weight. While design galleries and corporate agencies often treat typography as a refined discipline of grid systems and brand guidelines, its most potent history has always been written on the streets, printed on underground presses, and painted on protest banners. In Indonesia, the intersection of typography and resistance is not just an abstract theory; it is woven directly into the nation’s history of struggle, freedom, and collective action.
When Design Felt Broken: Back to the Grassroots
If you’ve spent years (maybe a decade or more) geeking out over kerning pairs, tweaking anchor points, and learning how to make type breathe on a page, the last couple of years have been a massive gut punch. Suddenly, you wake up to a world where entire visual identities and custom lettering are being spit out by AI in three seconds flat, trained on work stolen from actual humans.
Free, Open, and Unbound: Why We Built Gliftype
Let’s talk about a silent frustration that every designer, developer, and creator knows too well: you have an idea for a poster, a website, or an indie zine, you find the exact right typeface for the vibe, and then you check the price. Cue the record scratch. A single desktop license costs a fortune, a web license costs another, and suddenly, good typography feels like a luxury gated off for big corporations with deep pockets.
We spent years tinkering with curves, spacing, kerning pairs, and anchors, building typefaces because we genuinely love the craft. But somewhere along the way, we started asking ourselves: Who is all this gatekeeping actually serving?