# Typography & Text Systems

**Track:** Foundations — Creative Coding — the existing 50
**Framework / surface:** p5.js
**Level:** Intermediate
**Prerequisites:** The Coordinate System, Color

**In one line:** Text as computational form — placed, measured, arranged by code.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Set by code, text becomes computational form: glyphs placed, sized, and arranged by rule rather than laid out by eye. Typography has always been a system before it was an image — Jan Tschichold's "Die neue Typographie" argued for asymmetric, grid-governed order, and Karl Gerstner extended that into programmatic design. The digital turn made the letterform itself parametric: Wim Crouwel's "New Alphabet" was drawn for the constraints of the cathode-ray grid, and Zuzana Licko's Emigre faces embraced the coarse pixel matrix of the early Macintosh as a generative condition, not a limitation. To position type with numbers is to treat language as material — measured, modular, and open to systematic variation like any other mark.