Darin Vorobyova

Dan Hardie, a Miami-based graphic artist and creative consultant at Mutiny, Inc. shared an image he’d spotted online of some interesting signage formerly on the front of the Miami Medical Building.

Comprised of hand-cut metal characters (with a thoroughly avant-garde “Art Deco meets Modernist” approach), this instantly became a font design idea unusual and quirky enough to develop as a digital typeface.

The end result is Office Visit JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

BallPill — a trapless typeface in 5 weights

language: all latin glyphs

SK Brushwood is an experimental geometric font based on chaotic lines. It is inspired by the Greek stone script, but nevertheless it is modern. The main component of the letter shape is straight and sloping lines ending in straight corners, which makes it look like brushwood. This is why the font gets its name. SK Brushwood is perfect for headlines, posters, print work, and the Internet.

While searching through microfilm of an old, 1932 newspaper, I stumbled on the word "Poultry" written with trapezoidal letters. I did not recall seeing lettering like this and it inspired me to design a typeface that could produce a similar result. 

Poultry Sign has six styles in two widths, each with three weights. It is monoline, monospaced, and all caps. The letters on the lower-case keys reverse the trapezoid of those on the upper-case keys. The designer's expectation is that the most common use for this typeface will alternate upper-case and lower-case keys. The spacing of the letters is identical within each width so the styles can be layered to produce bi-colored or tri-colored letters. There is a second set of numbers that can be accessed with an OpenType stylistic alternative. Also accessible with OpenType stylistic alternatives are variations of letters T, N, L, Y, and lower-case V.

Heller Sans JNL is based on the main letterforms of an experimental alphabet designed by Steven Heller; noted author of over 170 books on design and visual culture. Some modifications were made in turning his design into a digital font. In his own words, here is the background to this typeface: “I recently recovered this from the junk heap. It is a yellowing photostat of my first and only typeface design (1969-70). Total folly! At the time I was smitten by Art Moderne lettering. I called it “Klaus Boobala Bold” because I liked the K and B. I’ve lost the letters S through Z, which were made. The letters were drawn with compass, Techno pen (that frequently clogged). as well as a triangle and T-square. The inline and outline made no real logical sense. I based the design, in part, on Kabel, Avant Garde and it was a product of whatever I could accomplish with those tools. The caps-only alphabet was photographed and produced as a film negative that was cut in foot-long strips and spliced to fit on a Typositor reel. Sadly, the negatives made for the font were too brittle and the splice snapped apart in the Typositor. I worked on it for well over a month and used the face only once. I realized with this attempt, like so many other times I attempted different challenges, that type design — indeed mechanical drawing — was not my strong suit.” Heller Sans JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Rever is an experimental typeface by a young designer Sasha Smirnov. It clearly alludes to 19th century typefaces with reverse contrast, but still the character shapes are as simple and geometric as possible. Rever answers the question “What can a reverse-contrast typeface look like today?” Its set of styles is non-traditional: in addition to a regular one, there are also an oblique (slanted to the left, not to the right!) and a stencil styles. The typeface can work for typographic experiments of any kind -- web, print or motion design. The font was released by Paratype in 2019.

Sihmitree is a gimmick typeface in which all glyphs have reflective (mirror) or rotational symmetry (or both). Sihmitree has two weights and is caps only, with most of the lower-case letters identical to the upper-case letters. It includes only those accented characters that are symmetrical. The letters of the alphabet are often used to explain symmetry. BCDEK are given as examples of shapes that can easily be formed with symmetry over a horizontal line. AMQTUVWY can easily be formed so that they mirror over a vertical line. Letters HIOX can be formed so they mirror over both horizontal and vertical lines, and as a result they will also have rotational symmetry. Letters NSZ can be formed so that they reproduce themselves with a rotation of 180º. That leaves letters FGJLPR, which are usually considered examples of asymmetry. However, there are script versions of J, L, and R that can be formed with symmetry, and variants of lower-case f and g can be made that are symmetrical. P looks a lot like the thorn character. Some of the numbers also present challenges when trying to form them symmetrically. The symmetrical alphabet is not stylistically harmonious and has limited use other than as an exploration of symmetry.

TG Axima is a neo-humanist sans, with 6 weights & 2 widths with a total of 12 font. Inspired from humanist fonts like Frutiger and gill sans with touched post-modern. TG Axima is a perfect match for editorial design even for experimental design. Looks great at the small details or the bigger size.

Katlynne is unpredictable. Katlynne is erratic. Katlynne is beautiful. Katlynne is an alternating contrast, sans serif type family. Arbitrarily separating the characters into ‘rounder’ and ‘straighter’ letterforms to determine what contrast each glyph will take. Katlynne is inspired by the observations made while watching the inexperienced use of broad tip pens. I found how and when individuals rotated their pen gave a visually intrusive, if not also pleasantly conspicuous effect. Often, the pen would naturally rotate horizontally (vertical contrast) on the rounder letterforms, and vertically (reverse contrast) on the straighter ones. This is more or less the formula Katlynne adopts as the contrast changes throughout the styles. Katlynne’s severity of contrast varies from ‘Negative Three’ to ‘Positive Three’ in four weights. With a central style ‘Book’ being the sensible, low contrast font in the family. Within the family there are four weights with 7 contrast styles, with complimenting true italics. Giving a total of 56 fonts! Katlynne's array of options works for creating stylistic similitude within layouts, where conspicuous title faces are needed with a cohesive text face to compliment. Alone, the ends of the contrast spectrum (Negative and Positive Three) create striking word forms for advertising, packaging and anywhere else a loud voice is needed.

Styro is a family of modernist-style stencil fonts. There are eight weights available, ranging in color from Thin through Black. All of the typeface’s weights are virtually monospaced, and with each weight of the family, the outside ‘strokes’ building up the letterforms increase in thickness. Styro’s characters are very condensed, and their design employs a reductionist formal vocabulary. For example, the counter-forms are expressed by thin lines that run inside of the letters, from their tops to their bottoms. These ‘counters’ are optically of the same width as the spaces between each letter. Many of the fonts’ stroke terminals – like those on the top of the ‘a’ or on the bottom of the ‘g’ – are reduced to simple geometric shapes. Diacritic marks take the form of light thin lines, which create a nice degree of contrast with their base letters. This thin-line treatment is also applied to many of the fonts’ punctuation marks. Styro is reminiscent of a series of stencil letters designed at the Bauhaus by Josef Albers, although Styro includes separate shapes for both uppercase and lowercase letters, instead of being a unicameral design. The Styro fonts were developed by Aarya Purohit at Indian Type Foundry, and they are an excellent choice for use in editorial design pieces about modern art and design.

Kihim in a single-weight display typeface. It is grid-based design – and a very decorative one at that. All of its letterforms are set on an extreme angle. The ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’ of each stroke reflect that angle, giving the typeface a ‘rotalic’ feeling, as if each letterform was rotated clockwise. Designed by Hitesh Malaviya, Kilhim is his interpretations of the late artist Nasreen Mohamedi’s drawings and photographs. Through the interplay of light and shadows, her work explored the creation and consumption of form. It featured highly structured grids, just like this typeface. Her work achieved a unique level of abstraction, in which simple marks caused grids to form and deform. In her photography, she concentrated on sparseness and shapes. Physical space occupied by the body was a point of departure for her. Beyond the body, there was the urban fabric of the city: the spaces created by walls, windows and intervals in architectural structures, through which people pass. Her almost mathematical placement of lines indicated a sophisticated handling of formal/aesthetic relations on the picture plane, and she carefully weighed the intervals between lines, releasing them onto the page with a rhythmic flow that alluded to musical notation. A lot of intriguing glyph repositioning happens with text set in Kihim, once OpenType features like ‘Contextual Alternates’ are activated. The font also has oldstyle figures as an optional OpenType feature, which is really quite an opulent extra for such an ornamental display typeface. With Kihim’s abstract letterforms and its use of diagonal lines, Malaviya pays homage to the rhythmic quality of Mohamedi’s oeuvre. Often, text in Kihim seems illegible or unrecognisable at first, before the reader starts to see through the rhythmic pattern of thick and thin lines: then one starts to se the written word. The Kihim typeface is named after the place where Mohamedi passed away in 1990, when she was only 53.

Varidox, a variable typeface design, allows users to connect with specific design combinations with slightly varied differences in style. These variations in design enable the user to reach a wider scope of audiences. As the name suggests, Varidox is a paradox of sorts--that is, a combination of two disparate forms with two major driving influences. In the case of type design, the conflict lies in the age-old conundrum of artistic expression versus marketplace demand. Should the focus center primarily on functionality for the customer or err on the side of advancing creativity? If both are required, where does the proper balance lie? Viewed as an art, type design selections are often guided by the pulse of the industry, usually emphasizing unique and contemporary shapes. Critics are often leading indicators of where the marketplace will move. Currently, many design mavens have an eye favoring reverse stress. However, these forms have largely failed to penetrate the marketplace, another major driving factor influencing the font world. Clients now (as well as presumably for the foreseeable future) demand the more conservative forms of monoline sans serifs. Typeface designers are left with a predicament. Variable typefaces hand a great deal of creative control to the consumers of type. The demands of type design critics, personal influences of the typeface designer and the demands of the marketplace can all now be inserted into a single font and adjusted to best suit the end user. Varidox tries to blend the extremes of critical feature demands and the bleeding edge of fashionable type with perceptive usability on a scalable spectrum. The consumer of the typeface can choose a number between one and one-thousand. Using a more conservative style would mean staying between zero and five hundred, while gradually moving higher toward one thousand at the high end of the spectrum would produce increasingly contemporary results. Essentially, variable fonts offer the ability to satisfy the needs of the many versus the needs of the few along an axis with a thousand articulations, stabilizing this delicate balance with a single number that represents a specific form between the two masters, a form specifically targeted towards the end user. Practically, a user in some cases may wish to use more conservative slab form of Varidox for a more conservative clientele. Alternatively, the same user may then choose an intermediate instance much closer to the other extreme in order to make a more emphatic statement with a non-traditional form. Parametric type offers a new options for both designers and the end users of type. In the future, type will be able to morph to target the reader, based on factors including demographics, mood or cultural influences. In the future, the ability to adjust parameters will be common. With Varidox, the level of experimentality can be gauged and then entered into the typeface. In the future, machine learning, for example, could determine the mood of an individual, their level of experimentality or their interest and then adjust the typeface to meet these calculated parameters. This ability to customize and tailor the experience exists for both for the designer and the reader. With the advent of new marketing technologies, typefaces could adjust themselves on web pages to target consumers and their desires. A large conglomerate brand could shift and adapt to appeal to a specific target customer. A typeface facing a consumer would be more friendly and approachable, whereas a typeface facing a business to business (B2B) customer would be more businesslike in its appearance. Through both experience, however, the type would still be recognizable as belonging to the conglomerate brand. The font industry has only begun to realize such potential of variable fonts beyond simple visual appearance. As variable font continues to target the user, the technology will continue to reveal new capabilities, which allow identities and layouts to adjust to the ultimate user of type: the reader.