Found Type is a collaborative web app where people photograph letters of the alphabet found in the real world - on walls, signs, buildings, packaging, pavements - and together build a living typeface made entirely by the world.
The premise is simple: letters are everywhere. Every one of them is a design decision made by someone, somewhere. Found Type turns that into a collective archive.
- A pannable, zoomable canvas of every submitted letter - alive and growing in real time
- Browse the full alphabet: each letter a mosaic of real-world finds from around the world
- Type any word and see it spelled out in found letters
- Submit your own: photograph, crop, tag, and your letter is live in seconds
⭐ What makes it different:
No accounts. No friction. One flow, one purpose. The more people contribute, the more beautiful it becomes.
📍 How it was built:
- The entire front-end was built in Figma Make, prompt by prompt, iterated screen by screen.
- The submission flow uses the Anthropic Vision API to validate every photo: confirming it shows a real letter, checking the tag matches, and generating a plain-English description stored in Supabase for moderation - meaning the collection stays clean without user accounts or manual review of every submission.
- Image processing happens entirely client-side via the Browser Canvas API: crop, resize to 800×800, compress - before anything reaches Supabase storage.
🛠️ Tools used
- Figma Make - full front-end
- Anthropic Vision API - AI validation + moderation
- Supabase - real-time database and image storage
- Browser Canvas API - client-side image processing
🔮 What's next
- A downloadable font made entirely from submitted photos.
- Filters by country, colour, style.
- A printed poster of the full collection.
- Contributor profiles.
Found Type - A living alphabet, found in the wild
Found Type is a collaborative web app where people photograph letters of the alphabet found in the real wor...