Specimen Builder
Create digital type specimens

Download now on GitHub or have a look at a demo

What is this?

Specimen Builder is an Eleventy-based digital specimen generator. It uses Specimen Skeleton to build a single page digital type specimen based on extensive user research.

Features

• Type tester with minimal design tools: alignment, font size, line height
• Automatically generates a list of all glyphs in a font file
• Supports multiple font files
• Variable fonts, too!
• Supports reading direction (left, right, top to bottom)
• Dark mode
• Responsive design support

Who is it for?

• Type designers and font creators
• Designers or developers who want to catalogue their fonts
• Foundries, to use as a base for typeface specimens

How do I use it?

Go to the GitHub repository and follow the instructions in the readme. It's quite straight forward to use the base styles to generate a specimen in about five minutes. But, this is only a base. You can build on top of Specimen Builder's default layout and features by using the supplied utility classes in the CSS, or just write your own!

But wait, there's more! A print template too!

The research didn't start and end with digital specimens. There was considerable feedback and investigation into what makes a successful printed type specimen and how designers use them.

To that end, we've prepared a print template based on those findings.

With this template, you can create print specimens that perform as a catalogue and reference for designers and font users.