The journal
How each of these faces was drawn and what it is good for, how this place works, and what it takes to get a typeface onto a page that loads. Written while making the fonts on this site, so the numbers in it are measured rather than remembered.
Four extensions, two real formats, and one decision that matters more than all of them. What to serve on the web, what to install, and why the file you ship should not be the file you sell.
Read it →A poster face whose strokes swell from hairline to heavy without a weight axis, drawn out to 12,201 characters across six scripts — and no use at all in a paragraph.
A brush face of 634 characters that sets every language written in Latin, Greek or Cyrillic, spaced at a tracking multiplier of 0.78 — and has no light weight, because it cannot have one.
A slab with the block extruded to the right, so every letter reads as an object with depth — and the one tracing setting that keeps its white sides from dissolving into the page.
Letters that look poured rather than drawn, with a highlight down every stroke — and the pixel-and-a-half channel under the capital B that decided how the face had to be traced.
A hand-drawn display face with pinched stems, needle-point serifs and a four-pointed star cut out of almost every letter. One weight, 105 characters, English only.
A display face whose contours are pushed outward until the shapes press together, with exactly one gloss punched out of every letter. One weight, 105 characters, English.
Every stroke rises from a narrow foot, swells, and tapers to a lick that curls upward. 105 characters, one weight, English only, and a flame direction that cannot be turned.
A plain heavy sans with the paint still running off the bottom of every letter. The runs hang below the baseline, so the face needs vertical room a normal sans does not.
You do not buy a font, you license one. What desktop, web and app licences really mean, which numbers they count, and the four mistakes that turn a $30 font into a letter from a lawyer.
Typefound's free poster tool sets type over your own image entirely in the browser — there is no endpoint on the site that accepts a picture, so nothing is uploaded, and the export is a PNG at the original size.
Eight properties that separate a page somebody set from a page that used the defaults. Fluid sizes, optical tracking, tabular figures, and the two lines that fix every table of numbers.
A Traditional Chinese web font is 11 MB where a Latin one is 92 KB. Here is where the bytes go, which techniques actually remove them, and why subsetting breaks on names.
A variable font holds a whole design space in one file. It is bigger than one static weight and smaller than three, so the break-even is around two — and optical size is the axis worth having.
Interface text is small, read in a hurry, and often a single word. The rules for buttons, form fields, error messages and numerals are not the rules for articles.
