No. 01
11 palettes
OKLab color, interpolated in OKLCH for perceptually even gradients.
Alpha · still in testing
Render any image into living glyphs.
Drop in a photo, dial in palettes, dithering and CRT-beam effects, and pull a clean character-grid render out in seconds. Animated. Exportable. Yours.
Free & open source · universal · macOS 11+ · Alpha — still in testing, expect rough edges
From the studio
A portrait, rendered in glyphs
Catalogue of Capabilities
Six specimens from the studio
No. 02
9 dithers
STBN blue noise, Floyd–Steinberg, Atkinson — tunable grain per render.
No. 03
7 glyph sets
ASCII, blocks, octants, sextants and braille — pick your alphabet.
No. 04
8 effects
Bloom, halation, scanlines and a Lottes CRT-beam post chain.
No. 05
Export
GIF, MP4, PNG, SVG and reusable preset JSON straight out.
No. 06
CLI + MCP
Agent-native — drive the whole studio from Claude or the shell.
Conservator's Note
First launch on macOS
Why the first open gets blocked
Free & open source, but not signed with a paid Apple cert — so macOS blocks the very first open. Any one of these clears it for good:
- 1Right-click the app → Open → Open.
- 2Or System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
- 3Or clear the quarantine flag from a terminal:
$ xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Glyph Grid Studio.app"
macOS 11 (Big Sur)+
Universal — Intel + Apple Silicon
~16 MB
No account
No telemetry