Cosmic, a face that melts
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.
Cosmic is a poster face whose strokes change weight inside themselves. A stem begins as a hairline and arrives heavy; a curve thickens through its belly and thins again before it closes. The contrast is not between one letter and the next, it is inside a single stroke.
That is a drawing decision rather than an axis. There is no weight to turn up and nothing to interpolate — the swell is cut into the outline, and the only way to get more of it would be to draw a different face.
The specimen word is Supernova because that is the condition the face wants: one word, large, allowed to be the whole picture, at a size where the thin parts are still visibly thin.
What is actually in it
Cosmic is 12,201 characters. It sets English, Western and Eastern European languages, Vietnamese, Greek, Cyrillic, Korean, Japanese kana and Thai. It does not set Chinese, and the product page says so rather than leaving you to discover it in a layout.
Korean is arithmetic, not drawing
Nobody draws eleven thousand syllables, and nothing that claims to has. Hangul is assembled: 19 initial consonants, 21 medial vowels, 28 finals, and every syllable in the block is one combination of the three. Fifty-one letters are drawn once and the syllables are composed from them, per syllable, by arithmetic.
The obvious way to compose them is wrong. Scale each jamo uniformly into its box, assemble the three, and a syllable like 한 comes out broken — the final consonant is short, so its box is short, and the short box pins the whole syllable to a size that does not match anything beside it on the line.
What makes it read is per-axis scaling with a snug factor: each jamo is fitted to its box in both directions independently rather than sized by its longest dimension. That is the difference between Korean that looks typeset and Korean that looks stacked, and it comes down to one number.
The first Hangul it drew was tofu
Asked to draw Hangul for the first time, the model returned tofu — the empty box a renderer puts on the page when a glyph is missing.
It had not misunderstood the brief. The reference image it was shown was set in a font containing 0 of the 14 Hangul syllables it was meant to demonstrate, so the picture in front of it was fourteen empty boxes, and it drew fourteen empty boxes. The copying was faithful. The reference was rubbish.
Thai needed positions, not shapes
Thai stacks. Vowels and tone marks sit above and below the consonant rather than beside it, so drawing the marks is only half of the work — the file needs GPOS mark positioning to say where each mark goes against each base it can attach to.
Without that table every mark lands at the same height regardless of what it is sitting on. On a face whose strokes are this uneven, that means a tone mark buried in the thick part of one consonant and floating clear of the next.
What it is for
Posters, and the things that behave like posters. A gig bill, a festival line-up, a record sleeve, packaging where the product name is the design, a title card at the head of a film, a logotype if the letters in the name happen to fall well together.
It earns the character count hardest where the language is not English. A Korean poster, a Thai flyer, a bilingual sleeve where the Latin and the Hangul come out of the same drawing instead of a display face plus whatever the system fell back to — very few display faces can do that at all, and that is the argument for this one.
One word is ideal. Two or three is comfortable. A headline of eight words is where it begins to cost the reader something.
What it is not for
Body text, and not marginally — set a paragraph in Cosmic and the modulation that carries a poster becomes noise between the words.
Small sizes fail for a specific reason: the thin strokes drop below what the screen can draw, the renderer discards them, and the letters develop holes. That is not a bug to tune around — it is a high-contrast face meeting a size it was not drawn for.
It has no business in an interface. Form labels, input fields, error messages, table headers, navigation, buttons, anything a person has to read quickly while doing something else — all of it wants a text face, and all of it gets measurably worse in this one.
There is one weight and no italic, which is a harder limit than it sounds. There is no emphasis, no second level of heading distinguished by weight, no quiet caption and no loud lead. Ask a browser for bold and it will not refuse — it smears the outline sideways, and on strokes that already vary within themselves that reads as a printing fault. Cosmic is always half of a pairing, never the whole page.
And it does not set Chinese. If your copy mixes Chinese with the Korean or the kana, the Chinese will come from somewhere else mid-line, which is worse than a missing glyph because it is quieter.
You can type your own words into it at /fonts/cosmic — a name, a headline, the Korean or Thai you actually have to set — and if it holds up, licences start at $18.00 in the shop.