Quill, drawn with a brush
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.
Quill is drawn with a brush rather than a pen, and the difference is not decorative. A broad nib gives you contrast by geometry: the pen has a fixed width and a fixed angle, so the thick and thin of every stroke follow from where the stroke is going. A brush gives you contrast by pressure and angle together — the stroke thickens where the hand pressed and tapers where it lifted, and the direction of travel is only part of the story.
The result is a face with wetter, less predictable modulation than a calligraphic serif. Strokes end in a taper rather than a cut, entry and exit strokes carry the movement that made them, and no two terminals resolve in quite the same way.
The specimen word is Calligraphy because it puts the awkward parts on show at once — two ascenders, a descender, a double letter and a g that has to sit down without falling over.
Six hundred and thirty-four characters
Quill is 634 characters: English, Western and Eastern European languages, Vietnamese, Greek and Cyrillic. That is every language written in those three alphabets, not a Latin face with a few accents bolted on.
It does not set Korean, Japanese kana, Thai or Chinese, and it was never going to. A brush stroke drawn for Latin does not carry into a syllabic block without being redrawn from scratch, which is a different typeface rather than an extension of this one.
The spacing had to be pulled in by nearly a quarter
Sidebearings are measured from the ink: find where the dark pixels start and stop, add the space the letter needs on each side, and you have your spacing. On most faces that measurement is honest, because the stroke ends where the letter ends.
On a brush face it is not. The ink tapers away at the end of every stroke, so the last dark pixel sits a long way inside the letter's real optical edge. The measurement reports a narrow letter, the spacing is set against it, and the word comes out with gaps.
The correction is a tracking multiplier of 0.78 — tighter than any other face here. That is not a stylistic preference for tight setting. It is the amount by which the taper lies about where the letter stops.
Seven ligatures, all switched off
Seven ligatures were drawn for Quill: fi, fl, ffi, st and others. Then every one of them was moved out of liga, which browsers apply by default, and into dlig, which does nothing unless it is asked for.
fi ligature is invisible plumbing and belongs on by default. At display size a joined st is a piece of the design — and at display size that decision should be the designer's, made deliberately, not inherited from a table.Turning them on is one line of CSS, font-feature-settings: "dlig" 1, and anybody setting a display face is already making choices about a handful of words. The default is conservative because the cost of a wrong default is a joined pair in a logotype nobody chose.
There is no light weight, and there cannot be
A light weight is made by taking the thin strokes and making them thinner. Quill has no thin stroke to work with — the hairlines are already the tapered tail of a brush stroke, at the point where the ink is running out. Take anything off them and they break into fragments.
Attempts at a light weight failed for that reason. A bold worked, because adding to a brush stroke is the same motion as pressing harder, and the shapes stay coherent when they thicken.
Neither shipped. What is on sale is a single weight with no italic, which is the honest description of what there is.
What it is for
Words that want to look handled. A wine or spirits label, a bakery or a florist's packaging, a record sleeve, a wedding or event identity, an editorial pull quote, the title card at the front of a film, a logotype where the brush stroke is the point.
It is particularly useful for names in languages that usually get the generic treatment. A Polish, Vietnamese, Greek or Russian brand name can be set in the same drawn hand as its English counterpart, which is the reason to pay for 634 characters instead of 105.
Give it one to five words, at a size where the taper at the end of each stroke is visible. That is the whole of what it does well, and it does it properly.
What it is not for
Running text. Set a paragraph in Quill and the modulation that reads as a hand at forty pixels reads as unevenness at fifteen.
Interfaces are worse than paragraphs. Form labels, input fields, validation messages, table headers, navigation, buttons — every one of them is read under time pressure by somebody trying to finish a task, and a brush face taxes that reading for no return. Do not put it near an address field or a price.
Small sizes are where the spacing work stops helping. A multiplier corrected for the taper at display size is not the right number at twelve pixels, where the tapers have already vanished into antialiasing.
One weight and no italic means no emphasis and no hierarchy from weight. Ask a browser for bold on a file that has none and it will fake one by smearing the outline, which on tapered terminals looks like ink bleed rather than emphasis. Quill is the display half of a pairing, and something else has to do the reading.
Type your own words into it at /fonts/quill — the actual name, with the actual accents — and if it holds, licences start at $10.00 in the shop.