A new way of writing.

Snarl is an alternative writing system designed by me to be flexible, formulaic, and customizable. It's based on a system of branching lines and curves, and can be stretched and twisted to fill a space while retaining meaning and legibility.

Snarl uses a modified binary cipher to convert letters of the alphabet to sets of curves, allowing for endless customization and adaptation to various languages and systems. These curves are strung together into words made of contiguous, unambiguous figures. Figures can be arranged into one or more sets, and the flexible nature of the script often allows sets to be packed together and intertwined for a striking appearance.

I developed Snarl in 2016 as an attempt at creating a script for the Latin alphabet using logograms instead of characters. I was inspired by a program I saw online that generated random logogram-like glyphs from a grid, so I started designing a system that would allow words in any language to be converted into a glyph using a series of lines. My goal was a set of rules that would allow you to translate perfectly to and from the script, but also allow enough flexibility that the script could be a kind of calligraphy.