Relief, a slab thrown right
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.
Relief is a slab with the block pushed out to the right. The face is black, the sides it throws are white, and the two together are the whole idea — a letter set in Relief does not read as a shape printed on the page, it reads as an object standing on it.
It is a narrow idea and a narrow face. One weight, no italic, and 105 characters: English, digits, punctuation, currency, maths and the common symbols. The accented letters were never drawn, so it cannot set Spanish, French or German — and a missing glyph in a headline is not a small problem, because the browser will quietly take one letter from some other font and leave it sitting in the middle of your word.
Skyline is the word we show it in, and not for the meaning. The ascenders are where the extrusion has room to run, and a face made out of depth is only as good as what it does with a vertical.
The sides are white, and so is the page
Every face here is a picture before it is a font, and the step in between is tracing: find the contour in the pixels, fit curves to it, hand the result to the outline. Every face in the pipeline gets a small blur before that trace. The blur smooths the contour so the outline follows the shape rather than every jag of the raster, and on seven faces out of eight it costs nothing at all.
Relief is the eighth. Its white extruded sides are drawn against a white page, and the only thing between them is a hairline. That blur is wider than the hairline. Blurred, the line fell below the level at which the tracer counts anything as a contour — so the white side stopped being enclosed, ran out into the background, and the black face lost the piece of itself the side had broken through.
What came out was not a soft letter or a slightly wrong letter. It was a letter with a bite out of the front of it, on whichever stems the side had happened to escape from.
So Relief is traced at the pixels, with the blur set to zero. That is the only reason the face holds together, and it is a setting that exists in the build for this face alone.
Where it belongs
Relief is a poster face and it behaves like one. Set it large, in short strings, and it does its one thing very well.
The obvious homes are posters, album covers, packaging where the name has to carry across a shop, a title card at the head of a video, a word across the back of a shirt. It has the right amount of swagger for sport, skate and arcade work — the extruded slab is the same device that has been painted on gym walls and pinball cabinets for fifty years, and it brings that reading with it whether you asked for it or not.
It makes a good logotype on one condition: set the word, then space it by hand. Extruded faces want more air between letters than flat ones, because the side of one letter is already standing in the gap before the next letter starts.
In a game interface it is right for the title, the score and the level name — the parts meant to be shouted. Not the menu.
One thing to know about the ground it sits on: the white sides are not white ink, they are holes, and the page shows through them. On a flat colour that is exactly right, and the letter picks up your background as its own shading. Over a photograph, the photograph appears inside the letters and the depth stops reading — you get a busy outline where you wanted a solid object.
Where it does not belong
Body text, first and plainly. Not "a little heavy for body text" — it does not work at all, and the failure is worth looking at rather than taking on trust.
Anything below about 24px on screen. The hairline the entire face depends on is one device pixel at best down there, and the renderer has to decide whether to draw it. Where it drops the line, the side merges with the page and you are reading a slab with a piece missing — the same failure the blur caused, arriving by a different route.
Print at small size is worse, because ink spreads. A hairline that survived the raster will fill in on paper, the side and the face run together into one black mass, and Relief at 9pt is a row of rectangles. On paper, give it size: a poster, a cover, a title — never a caption, a footer or a form.
Forms, tables, navigation, buttons, legal lines, anything a person has to scan rather than look at. And with one weight and no italic, any page with a heading hierarchy, an emphasis, a caption and a link needs a second family beside it. The decision was never which font, it was which two.
Finally, check the words before you commit. It sets English, and a name with an accent in it will break in public.
Type your own words into it at /fonts/solid3d — the page is filed under solid3d, which is the name the pipeline has known this face by since before it was called Relief. Licences start at $3.00 in the shop.