The Subtle Art Of Letterform Design

October 12, 2025 by Donald Papp 13 Comments

Typeface (such as Times New Roman) refers to the design that gives a set of letters, numbers, and symbols their signature “look”. Font, on the other hand, is a specific implementation of a typeface, for example, Times New Roman Italic 12 pt.

‘Q’ is a counterpoint to the idea that typography is just one fussy detail after another.

Right about this point, some of you are nodding along and perhaps thinking “oh, that’s interesting,” while the rest of you are already hovering over your browser’s Back button. If you’re one of the former, you may be interested in checking out the (sort of) interactive tour of typography design elements by the Ohno Type School, a small group that loves design.

On one hand, letters are simple and readily recognizable symbols. But at the same time, their simplicity puts a lot of weight on seemingly minor elements. Small changes can have a big visual impact. The tour lays bare answers to questions such as: What is the optimal parting of the cheeks of a capital ‘B’? At what height should the crossbar on an ‘A’ sit, and why does it look so weird if done incorrectly? And yet, the tail of a ‘Q’ can be just about anything? How and why does an ‘H’ define the spacing of the entire typeface? All these (and more) are laid bare.

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Jointly Is A Typeface Designed For CNC Joinery

September 16, 2025 by Tyler August 23 Comments

If you have a CNC router, you know you can engrave just about any text with the right tool, but Jointly is a typeface that isn’t meant to be engraved. That would be too easy for [CobyUnger]. His typeface “Jointly” is the first we’ve seen that’s meant to be used as joinery.

The idea is simple: carve mortises that take the shape of letters in one piece, and carve matching letter-tenons into the end of another. Push them together, and voila: a joint! To get this concept to work reliably, the font did have to be specially designed — both the inner and outer contours need to be accessible to a rotary cutting tool. Cutting tools get harder to use the smaller they go (or more fragile, at any rate) so with Jointly, the design spec was that any letters over 3/4″ (19.05 mm) tall needed to be handled with a 1/8″ (3.175 mm) rotary cutter.

This gives the font a friendly curved appearance we find quite fetching. Of course if you’re going to be cutting tenons into the end of a board, you’re going to need either some serious z-depth or an interesting jig to get the end of the board under the cutting head. It looks like [CobyUnger] has both, but he mentions the possibility of using a handheld CNC router as the cheaper option.

Speaking of routing out type, do you know the story of Gorton? You can’t make joinery with that typeface, but you’ve almost certainly seen it.

Light projected through prisms on to laser-cut letters submerged in water.

YOU Are A Projection Of Your Influences

November 18, 2021 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

Who are you? No, who are you really? You’re an amalgamation of influences from your family, your friends, the media, and the parasocial relationships you have with fictional characters. It’s okay; we all are. It can’t be helped that there’s a lot of it about.

[Kim Pimmel]’s YOU examines this question of identity in the form of projected typography. YOU are solidly laser-cut at birth, but then come the influences — the water of everyday life that surrounds you, the lights that mask your dread or lay you bare, and the prisms of circumstance that twist the light into brilliant patterns that burn memories into your brain.

In this case, the light comes from a hacked camping headlamp that was past its prime. [Kim] laser-cut the letters from acrylic and submerged them in water, which can be manipulated to enhance the effect and mimic the turmoil of life. For added effect, [Kim] held prisms in the light’s path to refract it and cause the patterns to dance. Be sure to check it out after the break, and don’t forget to turn on the sound so you can hear [Kim]’s original composition.

Want to see more trippy typography? Check out this vector art that started as Perlin noise.

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Finding The Average Of Every Font

April 24, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

An old book – the smell, the texture of the slowly rotting paper, and the smudges and margin notes accrued over decades – is one of the finer points in life taken for granted much too often. We’re bombarded with high precision vector typefaces all day, but [Dan]’s Avería font is beautiful in its irregularity. [Dan] made a font that is the average of all the fonts installed on his computer, and the result looks surprisingly great.

[Dan] started his journey down the generative font path by making images of every letter of all his fonts and mashing them together with a PHP script. The result was a terribly blurry font, and unfortunately this had been done before. [Dan] wanted a font with clearly defined edges, though, so the obvious solution would be to take the grayscale result of his first experiment, set a threshold, and make a monochromatic image. This plan didn’t pan out, and [Dan] needed a cleverer way to go about things.

The solution to the problem is astonishingly simple; [Dan] took the perimeter of each font glyph and divided it into hundreds of points. These points could then be averaged in 2D space making a real ‘average’ font.

Even though this project isn’t the usual ‘Arduino doing something’ fare, [Dan] came up with a really clever way of doing something that produced something really cool. It’s enough of a hack in our books. Tip ‘o the hat to [Aleks Clark] for sending this one in.