💾 Archived View for dioskouroi.xyz › thread › 24911784 captured on 2020-10-31 at 00:42:39. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

10 years, 8 months and 12 days

Author: app4soft

Score: 37

Comments: 14

Date: 2020-10-27 20:56:37

Web Link

________________________________________________________________________________

robocat wrote at 2020-10-27 22:35:19:

Here’s an online demo of the technology:

https://spectral.prototypo.io/

It seems like such a fantastic market, and a real shame they couldn’t convert it into a profitable product.

For decades I have wanted to do a similar startup, but I’ve always judged the technical challenges of what I wished to achieve to be beyond my skill (edit: more of a visual pipeline of stroke and adornment transforms with parameters).

lqet wrote at 2020-10-27 22:41:50:

> It seems like such a fantastic market

Does it? Maybe I am misunderstanding the product, but I am really struggling to think of potential customers. To me, it seems that people who actually _design their own fonts_ will be doing this on a much more professional level than just adjusting a few sliders. On the other hand, people who know so little about font design that such a technology would help them will get their desired results faster if they just use a stock font from Google Fonts. After all, they offer sliders, too, but the result is always a polished font which has been worked on by an actual designer. Also, it's free.

prototypo wrote at 2020-10-28 08:16:14:

Totally agree! This is exactly what I tell people who ask me why we have failed (I’m the author of this post : )

Yannick.

dmurray wrote at 2020-10-28 00:08:54:

Agreed, it's a fantastic idea, and great execution, but sadly not a fantastic market.

xwdv wrote at 2020-10-27 22:41:44:

It’s not a shame if there’s no market, it would only be a shame if there was a huge market and they failed to capture the opportunity.

dheera wrote at 2020-10-28 00:50:01:

It's a shame the market mostly allows for building mediocre products that millions of people want, instead of great products that thousands of people want.

Shared404 wrote at 2020-10-28 02:51:15:

What a fantastic way of putting that sentiment. I will probably steal that at some point.

germinalphrase wrote at 2020-10-28 00:55:15:

Plenty of beautiful things have no market.

howtowin wrote at 2020-10-27 21:49:27:

What a tough decision to make after nearly 11 years. My heart goes out to all the individuals who had their hearts in this company and product.

app4soft wrote at 2020-10-27 21:11:43:

_Prototypo_ font editor app source code actually hosted on GitHub.[0]

[0]

https://github.com/byte-foundry/prototypo

xyst wrote at 2020-10-27 22:15:05:

I applaud this person's effort and persistence. Many people have ideas, but many of those same people do not have the cajones to get it from paper to a product.

gnabgib wrote at 2020-10-27 22:00:38:

The post is from March, and the product ended in June (see the awkward tense flash across the top).. this seems.. untimely

prototypo wrote at 2020-10-28 08:19:21:

Actually we shut down the product in June because we used graphcool and graphcool shut down in... June : )

cj wrote at 2020-10-27 23:51:57:

Congratulations on what you built, and good luck with what comes next!