Drip, a sans that is still wet

Drip is a plain heavy sans with the paint still running off the bottom of every letter. Underneath the runs there is nothing clever: ordinary proportions, ordinary weight, an ordinary grotesque.

That is the joke, and it is the reason the face works. The runs read as an accident that happened to a normal typeface rather than as decoration somebody sat down and drew. Style the letters as well — stretch them, distress them, give them a character of their own — and the paint stops being paint and starts being a font, which is the failure mode of most faces in this genre.

The specimen word is Midnight, and it is a fair test: eight letters, a mix of ascenders, a descender, and enough width for the runs to visibly differ from one another.

The runs hang below the baseline

The decision that shapes everything else is that the runs hang below the baseline. They are not contained inside the letter's own body and they are not clipped at the foot, because a run that stops at the baseline is a shape rather than a drip.

The consequence is that Drip needs vertical room a normal sans does not. Set two lines at a leading that would be comfortable for the same weight of ordinary grotesque and the drips of the first line touch the letters of the second. Sometimes they merely crowd; sometimes a run lands on an ascender below and the two shapes merge into one.

Drip wants generous leading, and generous here means more than the correction you would already make for a large heavy face. Start well beyond what looks right and come down until the runs clear the next line with daylight left.

The runs vary per letter and do not repeat

Every letter drips differently, and no two runs in the character set are the same. This is what stops a word looking like a stamped pattern: two of the same letter in one word do not produce a matched pair, which is what real paint would not do either.

It is the detail that makes the face convincing, and it has a price. Drip cannot be relied on for a fixed baseline-to-baseline rhythm. How far the ink hangs below the line depends on which letters are in it, so two lines set at identical leading will not look identically spaced.

In practice that means Drip is not a face you can set to a grid and leave. Set it, look at it, and move the lines by hand. The face is asking to be treated as lettering, because lettering is what it is imitating.

Where it belongs

Gig posters and flyers, where one word is the whole design and there is nothing beneath it to collide with. Album art and sleeve type. A title card that holds the screen on its own for two seconds.

Streetwear prints, where the runs can fall off the bottom of the artwork rather than into anything. Stickers. A game logo, particularly one that should look sprayed rather than designed. Anything where the type is the image.

It is happiest at the foot of a layout, or at least with empty space below it, because down is the direction it grows in.

Where it does not belong

Body text. Not at any size and not for any length: the runs make the underside of every line irregular, and reading depends on that underside being regular.

Tight line-height, which rules out most of the places type actually goes — web headings in a stacked layout, subtitles, slide decks, packaging panels, and anything inside a fixed-height container, where the descenders get clipped by the box rather than by the design.

Small sizes. Small, the runs stop reading as paint and read as dirt: a heavy sans that somebody printed badly. The joke only lands when the viewer can see that the shape underneath is a normal letter.

Form fields and interface text generally, for the usual display-face reasons plus one of its own — the drips interfere with the field's underline and with whatever sits immediately below it.

Anything that is not English. The 105 characters are English, digits and the common symbols, with no accented letters, so no Spanish, French or German, and a mid-word fallback wherever one appears.

Anything needing a second weight. Single weight, no italic, so emphasis inside a Drip setting is not available. Pair it with a plain sans and let the sans do everything that is not the headline.

It is not in this site's typeface switcher, on purpose

Like Fire, Drip is kept out of the switcher that lets visitors set this site in one of our faces. It is sold, not worn.

The reason is the section above. A face that needs hand-adjusted leading and empty space under every line cannot be dropped into a page of navigation, headings and body copy without the page getting worse, and a demonstration made at the reader's expense is not one worth making.

Where to look

Drip is not loaded on this site, so it cannot be set in its own letters here. It is shown properly on its own page, where you can type a word and see how differently each letter runs, and it is in the shop from $3.00.