Star, a point cut into every letter
A hand-drawn display face with pinched stems, needle-point serifs and a four-pointed star cut out of almost every letter. One weight, 105 characters, English only.
Star is a set of capitals drawn by hand. The stems pinch at the waist, the serifs taper until they end in needle points, and a four-pointed star is cut out of almost every letter. It is a face with one idea in it, carried out everywhere.
The file covers 105 characters — English, digits, punctuation, currency, maths and the common symbols — in a single weight, with no italic. It cannot set Spanish, French or German: there are no accented characters in it, so a word that needs one comes back broken, or falls back silently to another font.
The star is what people notice first, and it is also the fact that decides where the face can go. A shape cut out of a letter is a counter, and a counter is the first thing that closes when type gets small or is printed on absorbent paper. Most of what follows is a consequence of that one sentence.
The lowercase had to be argued out of the pipeline
Star's lowercase is drawn to sit high against tall, pinched capitals. That decision was made by eye while the capitals were being drawn, and it is why the alphabet holds together at a glance — the lowercase reads as part of the same set of letters rather than as something smaller parked underneath them.
It then failed the numbers. Our build measures a new face against class medians and normalises its x-height to a pipeline default, and Star measures wrong against those medians for exactly the reason it was drawn that way.
Forced to the default, the lowercase came out shrunken beside its own capitals: correct by the measurement, wrong on the page. Star is therefore built at an x-height of 0.76 rather than the default, and the automated check was overruled — right about the number, wrong about the face.
The star is a hole, and holes close
The four points are cut out of the letter rather than drawn on top of it. At poster size that reads as a deliberate piercing — a black letter with a small, sharp white inside it — and the needle serifs and pinched waists agree with it.
Shrink the same file and the star is the first white to go. It closes before the bowl of an a does, for the simple reason that it is smaller than the bowl of an a. The pinch and the needle points follow: fine detail that is the whole point at 60px and simply absent at 14.
Paper does the same damage more cheaply than a small size does. Ink wicks into the fibres of uncoated stock and every white shrinks with it, so a star that was sharp on screen prints as a grey smudge with no points in it.
Where it belongs
Star works where the word is short, the size is large and the idea already in the face is on brief. It is a face about night and celebration, and it is best when the job contains one of those anyway.
A logotype is the best case. Five or six letters, set once, spaced by hand, converted to outlines and never asked to work at another size. Everything fragile about the face stops being a risk the moment the drawing is fixed.
After that: posters and gig posters, album art, a title card for a film or a video, packaging for spirits, tea, chocolate or cosmetics, festival identities, greetings cards, enamel pins and stickers, and the title screen of a game — the title screen, not the menus behind it.
It also sets a pull quote or a display line of three or four words on a page whose body text is something sensible — large, short, and looked at rather than read.
Where it does not belong
This is the longer list, and the one worth reading before buying.
Body text, at any size. These are capitals drawn for display, spaced for display, with detail that only exists at display size. Four lines in and the reader is decoding shapes instead of reading words.
Form fields, interfaces and anything read a character at a time. Postcodes, reference numbers, one-time codes, anything a person has to copy accurately. The ambiguous characters give way first.
Small sizes generally. Captions, footnotes, credits under an image, legal lines, the small print on the packet whose front you set in it.
Print on uncoated stock. Newsprint, kraft board, uncoated card, anything absorbent. Large and solid it is fine; small it fills in, and the star goes first.
Anything that needs a second weight. One weight, no italic. The face cannot emphasise a word, mark a subheading or build a hierarchy on its own, so it needs a text family beside it for everything that is not the headline.
Anything not in English. 105 characters is English and the common symbols, and that is all. If the job has a European language anywhere in it, check the words before press rather than after.
Star is a single weight, 105 characters, and from $3.00. The specimen word above is ours; the word you will set is not, so type yours into the face on the Star page before deciding. Licences are in the shop.