Play With The Text

The four lines on this site’s home page do not sit still if you ask them not to. Press Play with the text and every character — the four topic lines and the paragraph beneath, three hundred and fifty of them — becomes a separate body with its own physics.

The cursor is a force. Letters flee it, dimming and blurring as they go, so a soft hole opens in the text wherever you point. You can reach in and take one: press near the type and the nearest character comes to your hand, and wherever you drop it, it stays. As it comes away it takes the colour of whatever is playing in the video behind it, so dragging letters out slowly paints them. A− and A+ grow or shrink whatever is still in the line, while anything already placed keeps the size it was dropped at — which turns the two buttons into a way of composing in layers of scale.

It is a small argument about reading. Text on a screen is only conditionally solid, and a page that admits this is more honest than one that pretends otherwise. Reset puts every letter back.