TOPO

Climbing route topos still ship as scanned hand-drawn lines on grainy crag photos. The hand-drawn craft is part of the culture; the production pipeline behind it is a graveyard of orphaned PSDs.

I wanted a tool that respected the craft — a bezier-tracer that *feels* like ink — while letting the result re-export at any DPI for print, web, or carabiner-strapped beta cards.

Trace surface uses a custom curve primitive (catmull-spline with tension snap) so a route drawn freehand feels like one continuous gesture, not a series of node pulls.

WebGL pass overlays the rock photo with a film-grain that respects the source resolution — no cheap pixel doubling, no AI upscale gloss.

Print export composes vector paths over a high-DPI raster of the original, with route grading and protection notes typeset in a real letterpress face.

In the first six months: 1,400 routes drawn across 80 crags, ~30% of those by guidebook authors who later contacted me to license the tool privately.

Two regional climbing federations adopted Topo as their official topo-publishing pipeline.

Open-source. The cocoa-and-pebbles aesthetic still gets fan-art on r/climbing.