Notes

July’s Font of the Month: Fern Display Roman

I’ve always been unsure of what to do about my typeface Fern. It’s a texty Venetian serif that I designed early in my career with screens in mind. (Not that it should be limited to screens…I’ve seen it put to great use in print as well!) I know why I drew the thing, but I’m not sure I ever totally wrapped my head around what the typeface is all about or why I think it succeeds in text.

I’ve always known that Fern’s original cut (now called Fern Micro) has a chunkiness that would inhibit its use at larger sizes. So in 2013, I attempted to design a Display cut, shown below. It never felt right to me and has never been released, even though it is now old enough to be studying for its Bar Mitzvah.

Since this initial attempt, I’ve tried to draw a better Fern Display several times over the years. Each time, something would feel a little off. Sometimes it felt too brittle, like the attempt shown above. Sometimes it felt like it was trying too hard to be edgy. Other times it just became boring. I think it’s hard for me to separate the idea of Fern from its inherent textiness, so every time I try to sharpen it up for large sizes, it ends up feeling less like Fern to me.

So I largely abandoned the idea of creating Fern Display. Instead, I chose to slowly nudge the typeface in a displayish direction, first in 2021 with Fern Text, followed by Fern Titling Caps in 2022. 

Since then, I’ve heard from several clients and club members that they wanted to use Fern (with lowercase) on a cover or at large sizes, and I’m tired of apologizing for the lack of a Display cut. So I think it’s finally time to get this one right.

Today I’m sending you my latest and (hopefully) greatest attempt at Fern Display. It borrows the capitals and small caps from Fern Titling Caps, with much tighter spacing and some other minor tweaks. 

When it came to drawing the new lowercase, I tried to change as little as possible. From my abandoned previous attempts, I had a good sense of what I didn’t want for Fern Display—I didn’t want it to be too classical or calligraphic, I didn’t want it to be too contemporary or stylized, and I didn’t want it to be too smoothed-out or manicured. 

I admit it’s a little weird to design a font based on what you don’t want it to be, but thinking in negatives has helped me box in the amorphous, elusive thing that I actually wanted. This turned the design process into a game of Operation, as I did my best to avoid touching any of the electrified edges.

In addition to this new Display cut, I’m also including a range of optical sizes that encompasses the pre-existing Micro and Text sizes as well as a new Deck size as well for subheads and the like. 

As you can see in the comparison above, the thin strokes get thinner but not a great deal thinner, especially compared to a dramatic size transformation like Warbler’s. The asymmetry in the serifs is heightened—one side retains a wedgelike shape, while the other side flattens out almost enough to be a slab serif. The heavy triangular head serifs are allowed to get pointy, but this time I avoided the urge to sharpen every serif down to a fine tip. Sometimes it’s good to be a little blunt, even at Display sizes.

I am self-aware enough to know that my years of waffling about this design might seem silly—after all, this new Display is not meaningfully all that different from the thing I made in 2013. (I didn’t bother to dig up my other attempts, but they are probably even closer to what I’m sending you today.) Rather than reinventing the design, I think I just let enough time pass for my feelings to change around it.

This does feel like Fern though. And that is a good thing. I’m hoping that it’s expressive enough at large sizes, without being showy about it. And I’m hoping that it makes Fern a typeface that you can consider using across a spectrum of sizes! 

One last thing: what I’m sending today is Roman only, and just the Regular weight. If you don’t hate what I’ve done here, I can probably do the same to the Bold and Italic without it taking another 13 years. Probably.

Slight Chance in use for Perunggu’s PDD tour

Here is an incredible use of Slight Chance for the recent PDD tour of the Indonesian alt-rock band Perunggu, designed by Under The Table.

It is such an unexpected joy to have a font inspired by something very specific (the early digital readouts of a cable TV weather channel) and to see it travel across the world and get used so successfully in an entirely new context.

See more at Fonts in Use »

June’s Font of the Month: Gigawarp

Last month I sent you Megawarp, a sci-fi sans serif centered around the idea of fragmentation. But slicing letters into pieces doubtlessly impacts legibility, and I’ve watched a few people struggle to read the font. So I asked myself…what would happen if I stripped away that central idea, and tried to work from what was left?

The answer is Gigawarp. It’s bold, it’s wide, it’s modular, and in my opinion, it’s still pretty dang fun. It replaces Megawarp’s system of horizontal slices with a reduced set of vertical slices, most apparent on letters like a/e and p/d/b/q. These slices transform letters with counterforms into a single continuous strip, giving the typeface a wormlike quality that has its own precedent in futuristic design.

I mentioned Corporate Image in my last mailing, but it’s worth calling out again in the context of wormy fonts. Designed by Roc Mitchell as an open-countered, unicase variant of his typeface Corporate, this typeface acted as a roadmap for me as I charted Gigawarp’s course. 

Gigawarp still favors bold blocky forms over Corporate Image’s softened squircles, but I largely followed the way it “wormifies” the letterforms, as well as its general approach to unicase. I also borrowed the subtle small curves that help the legibility of descenders like g, j, and y.

Gigawarp’s unicase is by far my favorite part of the design—it feels both ancient and futuristic at the same time, and I love the ease with which uppercase and lowercase work together. Because of this, I decided that I couldn’t let these shapes simply hide inside OpenType features that folks might never see or use. So I’m including a separate Gigawarp Unicase family where you can access these shapes directly from the keyboard.

Like Megawarp before it, I had absolutely no filter when adding alternates to this typeface—this time I actually maxed out the twenty specified OpenType Stylistic Sets. New entries include sharp-cornered forms for letters like m/n and a/e, raised i/j dots, and a serifed capital I and L to help address the typeface’s Megaflicks problem. (Thanks to Melvian for pointing out this very serious issue!)

I will probably edit these alternates down into something more manageable at some point. But in the meantime, put on your spelunking helmets!

I should have been using my spare time to get a head start on next month’s font, but I couldn’t stop myself from trying out a Cyrillic and Greek for Gigawarp. Both turned out to be fun puzzles to figure out, as I changed the curved E to avoid conflict with Є (like Buckridge) and drew a majuscule М to avoid confusion with Т, which can take on a m-like form in its italic. Jovana Jocić kindly sent some comments on the Cyrillic, but both scripts are still a bit rough and in need of further review.

Thank you for going down this multi-month rabbit hole with me! I hope that Gigawarp provides an alternative to Megawarp that is more legible, easier to use, and still feels incredibly sci-fi. This series is simple and maybe even a little cheesy, but I continue to have a ton of fun working on it—it’s going to be hard not to design a Kilowarp font for you next month.

Job Clarendon for Book of Paul

See some BIG Job Clarendon on Book of Paul, a 2026 album by Texan country artist Paul Cauthen. The album was designed by Mitchell McCleary, with photography from Tyler Ellison.

See more at Fonts in Use >

10 years, part 2: Bungiversary

Part two of my two-part foundry launch happened 10 years ago today, when I launched Bungee from the bus as I was on my way to NYC for Typographics.

The website you see on my screen was designed with Nick Sherman and Chris Lewis. On this bungiversary I want to express my gratitude to them, and to the folks at Font Bureau and Google Fonts for helping to bring this typeface to life!