How the glyphs started

Before there were frogs there were sixteen small squares.

Each glyph is a 5×5 grid of pixels, and each one has a name that is also its meaning: eye, mouth, pond, leap, rare, fake, mint, chain, sad, feel, paint, meme, egg, tad, void, self. There are no letters for sounds. You don't spell a word in this script. You set meanings next to each other and let them lean on one another.

So sad, self, feel, void, sad is a whole sentence. So is egg, tad, leap.

Drawn by code

I draw everything with code. The canvas is small, 100 pixels wide and 140 tall, then scaled up four times, so every pixel turns into a visible block. The paper gets a little random tooth. The brush is a chunky, slightly ragged dab, like an old paint program. The frogs come in three greens, the lines are off-black ink, and each card gets exactly one accent colour.

The specimen sheet holds all sixteen at once. The banner on this site is the same alphabet laid out in a row, with one glyph in gold: self.

The one that stays quiet

One glyph is kept apart. rare is a mark, not a word. It sits in a corner and doesn't join the sentence.

Hover over any glyph on this site and it will tell you its name. The rest is reading.