Introduction

Malleable Glyph is a small graphical design, fitting exactly to a square of 1in × 1in. It is "shaped" by a numerical parameter $x$ ranging from $0.0$ to $100.0$.

For example, a very simple malleable glyph is a horizontal line that is extremely short for $x=0.0$ and as long as possible for $x=100.0$:

Like every other graphical design, certain malleable glyph can be prettier or uglier. But there is another property of a malleably glyph that we are also interested in: its resolution, or how many different "sizes" (i.e. different values of the parameter $x$) of the glyph can be recognized by a naked human eye.

For example, a scaled five-pointed star has a somewhat better resolution than the simple horizontal line:

The Tutorial

To learn working with the mglyph library, it's best to start with the tutorial (just download the Jupyter Notebook and run it, or explore the same one in Google Colab).

In case something doesn't work as expected, something needs more clarification, or you have a suggestion for another functionality, please, contact us.

The Malleable Glyph Zoo

There is a growing set of glyphs produced by various people – The Zoo of Malleable Glyphs. You may find inspiration there. The easiest is to open it in Google Colab

What is The Malleable Glyph Challenge?

It is possible to objectively evaluate the resolution of a malleable glyph compared to other glyph designs. For example, the following four glyphs were evaluated by human subjects using our evaluation tool:

The chart compares the resolution of the four glyphs. Higher curve is better than a lower curve (details are in the paper).

Malleable glyphs can differ in countless graphical aspects: shape, color, texture, complexity, fractal structure, use of the space, contrast, etc., etc. We are interested in what features make one malleable glyph design better than another. And we would love to see designs that so cleverly and so knowledgeably use the 1in x 1in space that they overcome other designs.

We challenge anyone and everyone to design the best malleable glyph ever. We pledge to evaluate submitted malleable glyphs in a fair manner. We intend to periodically publish the top-performing malleable glyph designs and to analyze what factors seem to be strong and useful. We invite the designers of top-perforing and influential malleable glyphs to co-author the scientific publications and to join us in deepening the knowledge and understanding of human perception and graphical design.

See a detailed description of The Malleable Glyph Challenge rules and organization.

Use the Self-Evaluation Tool

1. Create one or more glyphs, export them to files.

2. Put your exported glyphs into our Self-Evaluation Tool.

3. See for yourself how your glyphs are performing.

The Self-Evaluation Tool works entirely in your web browser. Glyphs that you insert into the tool are not uploaded anywhere, but they stay in your computer.

FAQ

Ask and we will answer.

Research Articles

• Herout, A., Bartl, V., Gaens, M., & Tvrďoch, O. (2025). The Malleable Glyph (Challenge). Computing Research Repository (CoRR) in arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2503.16135

Contact

We will be happy to hear from you.

Please, e-mail Adam Herout