Punchcutter

A punchcutter cut every letter in reverse, by hand, into the end of a steel bar, struck that punch into copper to make a matrix, and cast the type from it. One size, one weight, one alphabet, several months. Nothing about the job was parametric.

This draws letters the way a designer thinks about them rather than the way a font file stores them: as the path a pen walks. Each letter is a run of straight lines and circular arcs, and the solid shape is recovered by sampling that skeleton and pushing each sample out along its own normal by half of whatever the width is there. Bowls are rounded boxes with elliptical corners, so one slider carries the face from a circle to a rectangle without any letter needing a second drawing — and because the width may vary along a stroke, a shoulder can thin where it runs into a stem, which is the thing every drawn typeface does and no single-width pen can.

The four families come out of that same skeleton rather than four sets of drawings. Serifs are the shape put on a stroke end that stands in open air — which is why an E gets them on the tips of its arms and not where those arms disappear into its stem, and why an O, having no ends at all, gets none. Contrast is a trick of coordinates: the letter is drawn horizontally squashed, stroked with the same round pen, and stretched back out, which turns that round pen into an elliptical one and thickens every upright while leaving the horizontals alone. Monospace decides the advance first and fits the letter to it. And the hand is knocked off the line by a wobble seeded from each letter, so an a is always the same a.

The spacing between letters is measured rather than guessed. Every glyph is reduced to a silhouette — how far its ink reaches in each horizontal band — and a pair like AV or To is pulled together by the difference between how far apart they actually sit and how far apart their own sidebearings promised. It is applied on this page and written into the file as a real kerning table, so what you are looking at is spaced the way the font will be.

The download is a TrueType file assembled here, in this tab: eleven tables, a checksum over the whole thing patched back into the header, and the same outlines you have been looking at. There is no server, no account, and no upload. A face you do not want anybody to see never goes anywhere.

Everything you make with it is yours, with no conditions. It is one of the Plausible Ventures.