Fire, every stroke a flame

Fire is a display face in which every stroke is a tongue of flame. A letter does not really have stems and bowls; it has fuel. Each stroke rises from a narrow foot, swells through the middle where a flame is fattest, and tapers to a lick that curls upward and off the end.

Set a word in it and the letter stops being the unit. The specimen word is Wildfire, and it reads as one burning thing with a row of peaks along the top rather than as eight letters that each happen to be alight. That effect is what the face was drawn for, and almost everything else about it — the coverage, the size range, the single weight — is a consequence of chasing it.

It is also, along with Drip, the most limited face in this catalogue, and this article spends more words on where it fails than on where it works — that being the part no specimen image will tell you.

Every flame points the same way

The decision that defines Fire is that the flame direction is fixed. Every stroke curls the same way, on every letter, with no per-letter variation and no mirroring to suit an awkward shape.

This was not the obvious choice. Letting each stroke curl in whichever direction its own form wanted would have made individual letters prettier, and would have destroyed the effect: a word would read as a row of separate small fires rather than as one fire with a word in it.

With one direction the licks line up. The eye follows the peaks across the top of the word and reads a single flame front, which is the whole reason to buy the face.

The cost is that Fire has a top and a bottom. It cannot be set rotated or upside down without looking wrong — not stylised, wrong, in the way a photograph of a candle is wrong when you turn the page over. Rotate it ninety degrees for a spine or a vertical side-tab and the flames blow sideways out of a wall. Flip it and they point at the floor.

The tips are the thinnest thing the face draws

A taper that runs to a point has no minimum width. It simply gets thinner until the renderer stops finding anything to fill, and the lick vanishes a fraction before the eye expects it to.

This is geometry rather than hinting, so there is nothing to correct in a later release short of blunting the tips, which would mean drawing a different face. It caps the small end of the size range: below a certain size Fire stops being a flame and becomes a heavy blob with a scruffy top edge.

It is worse in print than on screen, and it fails in the opposite direction. Ink spreads into the thin tips and fills them in, so instead of a lick that disappears you get a lick that thickens into a stub. The flame loses its point and the word loses the thing it was bought for.

So proof Fire at the real size on the real stock before a job is committed. If that is not possible, set it larger than feels necessary.

Where it belongs

Fire is a one-word face. Gig posters, particularly for heavy music, where the band name is the artwork. Album and single artwork; a metal, hardcore or doom sleeve is the case it was drawn for.

A horror title card. A game logo. Streetwear — a chest or back print, where the word is large, the surface flat and nothing has to be read in a hurry. Stickers, enamel pins, a vinyl label.

Two words is workable. Three starts to be a wall of flame, and at that point the effect stops being a word on fire and becomes texture.

Where it does not belong

Body text, obviously, and we will not pretend otherwise. Fire cannot set a paragraph at any size, on any medium, for any audience.

Small sizes of any kind: captions, credits, the small print at the foot of a poster, the track listing on the back of a sleeve. The tips go first and take the face's character with them.

Interface text: navigation, buttons, labels, and above all form fields, where somebody has to read back what they typed. A field set in Fire cannot be checked.

Anything outside English. The 105 characters cover English, digits, punctuation, currency, maths and the common symbols, and that is the end of it. One é or ü and the browser falls back mid-word to whatever is next in the stack, which looks like a bug because it is one.

Anything needing a second weight. Fire is a single weight with no italic, so there is no emphasis available inside the face — it has to come from size, colour, or a second typeface. Pairing it with a plain sans for everything that is not the title is the normal arrangement, and the sans does most of the work.

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

Typefound lets a visitor set the site in most of our faces. Fire is excluded, and so is Drip. A page of navigation set in flames is a page nobody can use, and making that demonstration at a reader's expense is not worth the showing off. Fire is sold, not worn.

It is a fair test for any display face, including somebody else's: if a foundry will not set its own interface in a face, be careful about setting yours.

Where to look

Fire cannot be shown in its own letters here, because it is deliberately not loaded on this site. It is shown properly on its own page, where you can type your own word and watch what happens along the top of it, and it is in the shop from $3.00.