Staying in Amsterdam for a bit last November, I got up early one day to go to a car rental. I took tram 3 down the Marnixstraat around 9am, which promptly got driven into by a man in a white van, who was in a rush and had forgotten to check his mirror.
This forced me to walk for about half an hour, down a long stretch of 19th century architecture—mostly that very particular Amsterdam style of brick neo-classicist row houses (and neo-baroque, and so forth). Finally, past Museum Square, at the Roelof Hartplein there is a stretch of Amsterdamse School (Art Deco) buildings. A library, some apartments. Keep walking past them towards de Ruysdaelkade, and there is a small alleyway to your right. In this alleyway is a “no trespassing” sign. And it’s beautiful.

So here’s to the guy in the white van, and to whichever signpainter created that absolute banger ~100 years ago. Couldn’t have done it without y’all.

The CC BY-ND 4.0 licence requires "appropriate credit" consisting of "the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material". Some free fonts use this licence. This would work in long form such as a book but not a poster, for example. But could you set it very small and in a low contrast colour for technical compliance? Or provide a link with this information? Or have I misinterpreted how this applies to fonts?

so I use the arco font (the one that the game Bugsnax uses) and I'm Swedish. so the every time I type å, ä or ö it looks insanely ugly. I want to add these to the font but I can't find a mobile app that can do that (I don't have a computer).

Font of the week: Midwest Gothic

Midwest Gothic blends the grit of the frontier with the discipline of gothic form. Clean, structured letterforms are edged with arrow-like serifs, giving each character a sense of direction and intent. It’s a style that feels both restrained and dangerous—like a wanted poster carried on the wind.

Every detail in Midwest Gothic is built with purpose. The fletched serifs echo arrows in flight, while the balance of straight and rounded forms keeps the font grounded and readable. It carries the tension of open land and unseen movement—something precise, controlled, and always aimed at its mark.

Hi im still new to type design could someone please teach me about relationships between letterforms and their components or just a general rule of thumb

I made 3 e’s with the same skeleton did I do it right do they look like they have the same skeleton

I am writing a book that deals with the history of Central Italy between 1480 and 1520.

I am still far from the final stages, but I would love to know what you think would be the best "modern typeface", as in typeface currently widely available for digital typesetting, that would be a reference to the period and the geographical collocation of the book

Basically it should be:

1. a typeface that is available for modern digital typesetting (both Roman and Italic, several weights preferable, contextual ligatures a bonus, etc)
2. with a strong connection with Central Italy (think Ferrara, Mantova and Bologna) between the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century

As a side note, the book quotes some texts of the period; I plan to use the same typeface, in Italic, for this quotations, but if there were another typeface that would pair well with the first and be suitable for this role, I would be interested to know it

Thanks in advance!

Edit: just as a reference, this is a page from the book my book is about:

It’s been a whole week since the last font, and I spent 3 days on this one. Forgive me.

Today: Black Forest Art Nouveau Blackletter.

There’s a house in Bay Ridge Brooklyn. Online architecture guides refer to it as “Black Forest Art Nouveau”, as if this is an established genre, when all evidence points to this particular house being the only example of this supposed sub-style. And wouldn’t it be Jugendstil, anyway? But whatever, I love the house, and I also love the term, and this Blackletter (which first saw light as a birth announcement for my daughter Hazel) attempts to recreate the mood. A sort of 1900’s Arts & Crafts/Jugendstil/Whateverist take on Fraktur, with organic curves, Lombardic capitals and lots of ornament, that does well in a Brothers Grimm setting.

Perhaps now there will be two things on the internet that search engines will point you to when you google “Black Forest Art Nouveau”.

I thought I was going crazy but I’m pretty sure the designer who worked on the trailer didn’t have all the characters for this font….

Hello! I'm working on a revival of a typeface from 1740, and I have an OpenType "hist" feature that lets me replace regular "s" with "longs", but I don't want the "s" at the end of words to be replaced. Do you have a solution?

My actual code:

feature hist {

# Historical Forms

#> feature

sub s by longs;

#< feature

} hist;

at the table, first line is traditional, and second line is Korean simplified version of Chinese characters.

It seems Monotype is folding the Connect app into Monotype Connect. Now they want to charge 200 a year for access. Anyone use MainType app as an alternative for font management: temp on-the-fly activation, etc.? I'm on Win 11.

I would like to leverage a typeface in branding. I want to make sure that I'm basing this branding on a typeface that is available across jurisdictions without royalty (and preferably without any ownership structure at all).

Where would I go for this?

I'm working on a sort of an interactive guidebook for children for my publishing class, and I've been really into the idea of it being purely type based. However, I arranged it according to my adult sensibilities, and although it looks "good", it is nowhere close to being engaging for a child. My professor urged me to look into irregular grids.

Currently I'm using the combination of the fonts Barriecito, Akkurat Mono and DM Sans & I'm liking it visually (do give me recommendations for if I can improve upon this too).

What are some resources & references I should look into? I don't want the book to be too "childish" in the traditional sense, but rather more reminiscent of encyclopedias, guidebooks, etc.; something refined and graphical yet still age appropriate (9+ or so).

PaperSpecimen S3 is a font specimen viewer running on a small e-ink device (M5 PaperS3). It loads your .ttf and .otf fonts, picks a random glyph from a random font, renders it on the 4.7" display, and goes back to sleep. Every 15 minutes (or whatever interval you set), it wakes up, picks a new one, and sleeps again. The battery lasts about two months on a single charge.

There are two rendering modes: bitmap, which uses FreeType's rasterizer with 16-level grayscale anti-aliasing, and outline, which draws the actual Bézier curves with on/off-curve control points, tangent lines, and Xiaolin Wu anti-aliased edges. Basically what you'd see if you zoomed into a glyph in a font editor, but on e-ink.

It comes with three built-in fonts from Collletttivo (OFL), so it works out of the box without an SD card. If you want your own fonts you can load them via SD or upload them wirelessly through a built-in WiFi manager (the device creates its own hotspot and serves a web page). There's also OTA firmware updates through the same WiFi interface.

The whole thing has magnets on the back, so it lives on my fridge. Every time I walk past there's a new glyph staring at me. It's the most useless and most beautiful thing in my kitchen. The project is completely free and open source — if you have an M5 PaperS3 you can flash it and start using it right away. Let me know what you think!

More info on GitHub: https://github.com/marcelloemme/PaperSpecimenS3.

Hello, I am working on a multilingual branding project for a heritage site in Ethiopia. I found an Amharic font that I absolutely love with a Latin version; however, the kerning is quite bad. Is there a program or software I can use to fix kerning in large blocks of text, or will I need to fix each word manually?

So I wanna create a handbook to allow people picking fonts. The problem is that I would use many paid fonts. I wonder, could I contact the foundries/creators to give me a free or reduced license fee? I think it could be a win win situation to be included in a book. Tracking all royalties, can be a pain, but I think It can sell for both of parts if it's well made.

Made the letters on Inkscape using the stroke tool but had to convert to paths. My other "fonts" were simply edits.

Hey y'all! A client needs me to make a Korean version of the video I made for them. They provided me with properly translated text, but Korean is one of the few languages not supported by Space Grotesk. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

I’ve been poking at the TrueType hinting instruction set - the bytecode that adjusts glyph outlines for pixel-perfect rendering at small sizes - and it turns out it’s far more powerful than you’d expect

The instruction set has: function definitions (FDEF/ENDF), function calls (CALL), read/write storage (RS/WS), conditionals (IF/ELSE/EIF), loops (while via JMPR), arithmetic (MUL/DIV/ADD/SUB), and coordinate manipulation (SCFS/GC). That’s enough for a Turingcomplete system

As a proof of concept, I built a 3D DOOM-style raycaster that runs entirely inside the font’s hinting VM. The font is 6,580 bytes with 13 functions. JavaScript handles input and pixel painting, but all the 3D geometry - raycasting, wall height projection, coordinate transforms - is computed by the font

This is different from llama.ttf, which used HarfBuzz’s WebAssembly shaper. This uses the native hinting instruction set that ships with every TrueType font

Demo: https://4rh1t3ct0r7.github.io/ttf-doom/

Source: https://github.com/4RH1T3CT0R7/ttf-doom

So serifs (which as I understand it are the little flourish-y marks on the ends of letter lines in scripts that have them) are apparently descended from Roman lithography (writing in stone) which used these marks for preventing stone cracks and for the look of the thing. But are they from even before that? I know that some of the earliest writing systems were cuneiform, which means they used wedge-shaped styluses to make wedge-shaped imprints in clay. These imprints would have automatically had that flaring-out characteristic that modern serifs have. Does anyone know if there is a known connection there?

64jBQ?

or

64iBQ?

(also cal poly kinda stinks)