FORGE is a fictional foundry that still casts type in lead. The page runs hot: embers climb the whole scroll, the crucible reads live temperature, and the specimen letters are — correctly — backwards.
The best detail in metal type is that every sort is a mirror; the letter only rights itself on paper. The specimen shelf makes that the interaction: lead blocks hold reversed glyphs until hover "prints" them. Everything else obeys foundry physics — real type height (23.317 mm), real alloy ratios, lead's real 327° melting point on the thermometer.
Alfa Slab One — display. A slab with real tonnage; the closest a webfont gets to something you could drop on your foot.
Bitter — body; a slab-serif book face that keeps the metal theme at reading size. Fira Mono reads the gauges.
| Element | How it works |
|---|---|
| Ember field | Seventy particles rise on individual sine-wander paths, drawn with lighter compositing so overlapping embers genuinely glow hotter. Two ember temperatures (orange / molten) flicker on offset clocks. |
| Click sparks | Every pointer-down bursts 22 sparks with gravity and streak tails — velocity-stretched line segments fading by life. |
| Molten headline | A 220%-wide five-stop gradient clipped to the display text and animated across it — the pour, always mid-flow. |
| Lead sorts | Pure CSS metal: layered gradients for the milled face, inset shadows for the bevel, a lower "nick" bar (real sorts have one so compositors feel orientation). Glyphs sit at scaleX(-1) until hover flips them to print orientation and heats them ember-orange. |
| Crucible gauge | An interval jitters the melt readout around lead's true 327 °C, comma-decimal like a European dial. |
| Accessibility | Reduced motion: no embers, no sparks, no pour animation, static gauge — the mirrored-sort interaction remains, as it's state not motion. |
| You do | The page does |
|---|---|
| Click anywhere | The floor throws sparks with gravity |
| Hover a sort | The mirrored letter prints itself the right way round, glowing |
| Watch the crucible | The melt holds around 327 °C, as lead does |