Chronotype is the third tool I have built for the art department, and the most personal - it comes straight out of problems I kept hitting on the job. It is a suite of browser-based studios for building graphic props from scratch: posters and bills, newspaper front pages, bottle and jar labels, cartons and packs, and official paperwork. Everything it makes is fictional by design and clearance-safe.
What it does
Five studios, each a single self-contained file that runs with the network off. Poster Studio; Newspaper Press, with front pages and mastheads from the 1860s to the 2020s across seven countries; Label Studio; Pack Studio; and Document Studio, spanning 29 document types from office and civil to police and legal. Each studio carries its own type and exports print-ready SVG that keeps the faces it used.
Why period and language matter
A prop reads as real or it does not, and the tell is almost always the type and the era. Chronotype sets its paperwork in English, Greek and German, and changing language changes four things at once - the vocabulary, the printed labels on the form, the conventions (Greek drops the tonos in capitals; German writes its dates its own way), and the type itself, remapped to a Greek-capable face wherever a Latin display font has no Greek.
The standing rule
Everything these studios generate is fictional. No real trademark, masthead, appellation seal or government stamp is reproduced - references are used for grammar and structure only: the plate shape, the type hierarchy, where the strength sits on a label, how a border turns a corner. Never the name or the arms. It is the same clearance-safe principle that runs through all my design work, turned into a tool.