The two great technical constraints a type designer can tackle are low resolution, which limits detail and dictates proportions between negative and positive shapes, and uniform width, which restricts each letter to a fixed horizontal space. Wrestle with both at once, and each letter becomes a black-and-white chessboard that challenges every design decision. Sometimes battling these constraints gets in the way of a good idea, but other times, tinkering with fewer options can make the job irresistibly easy and lead straight to a grid addiction. Gridlite, an experiment with a modular negative space, is the side effect of such an addiction. It’s simplified, monospaced, and variable: foreground and background alike are ready to be animated, typed, scaled up, scaled down, rounded, or otherwise deformed. Gridlite is primarily a variable font with axes that control the size of the elements, their shape, and the background (one for the rectangular field and one for the compact envelope around the letters). The fonts cover Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin scripts. Small caps are included, for no apparent reason ... and there is a monospaced elephant, too.