Many fonts evoke a writing implement, as if jotted down by a calligrapher’s nib, typewriter, receipt printer, or crayon. But Mistral - sultry, silly, serpentine Mistral - evokes a room number written in lipstick on a cocktail napkin, slid across the hotel bar to the handsome stranger drinking alone. And Mistral’s magic is that you can swap out the faces and places in this story and it still makes sense: that cocktail napkin could be all that’s standing between two achingly attractive actors in a Mad Men episode, or two wrinkled divorcees on a Swingers Cruise docked off the port of Tallahassee. 

Mistral is winking. Mistral is on vacation. Mistral is in Amalfi, Mykonos, Nice. But don’t be intimidated - Mistral is just as happy in Cancun, Daytona Beach, The Sandals Inn. And yet still, Mistral is in post-war Paris, sharing cigarettes with American soldiers in second-rate jazz bars. And ‘80s road-side honky-tonks. And on the label of Taylor Swift clip-on earrings at Claire’s. Because while Mistral has style, panache, and confidence, it most importantly does not take itself seriously. It is interested, primarily, in having a damn good time.

Someone with bad taste would find Mistral elegant and demure. Someone with self-conscious I-must-prove-my-coolness taste would find Mistral corny. But for decades, designers have loved Mistral for all the right reasons. They know that like a good dream or a childhood memory, Mistral is better left unexplained and unjustified (unless done in a quite tasteful font Substack, of course). They know that mistral is best when it is felt, enjoyed, assumed to be real, longed for.

And indeed, Mistral is often used as a typographic perfume. That is to say - sparingly, with an affect and a wink. It is used for subheaders, throw-away lines, phrases, quotes - typically  between the headline and the body text. Mistral would never kiss and tell about all of this, but I would 😘

Handel Gothic is a font that’s lived dozens of creative lives. In between those lives lies a lesson in how we consume art and design: we all see things a little different because the first thing we see is our reflection.

Here’s a soundtrack to set the mood.

Beth is 82, Akron born-and-bred and now living, assisted, in Cleveland Heights. Despite her failing health she has not lost an inch of her wit, and now she is at that wit’s end. “It works fine. I don’t need a new one,” Beth pleads with Scott. Her little Scott. Now 59, simmering with exasperation that his mother won’t throw it out. She doesn’t even know what it is, at least by name, and refers to it as the player. “Mom. Look at it. It has its name written on it… it’s like a pair of a sleep-away camper’s underwear. SoniVox. What good stereo has a name? And look at that font it’s written in for Christ’s sake.“ This is the kind of embarrassment that Handel Gothic, the font in question, gets subjected to now.

Maybe it’s deserved. Handel Gothic is plastic, oversized, and clumsily electronic like a toddler’s toy cellphone. It is memorabilia of a past future, preserved under the dust of rural Radio Shacks and aging ravers’ boxes of concert posters. It is from an era when digital memory wasn’t in the infinite Cloud, when a home movie lived on magnetic tape coiled around two spools, entombed in a PB&J-sized plastic box, slipped in a cardboard cover frayed white at its edges, and sitting on a shelf in the basement next to the golf clubs and hand-me-downs.

It’s not all that bad, though. Beth’s grandkids actually kinda like Handel Gothic. Not that they could name it. But they’d fuck with it on the label of thrifted JNCOs or a Post Malone album cover. Their generation understands that time is no longer a flat circle. Forget about trends coming back - now they never go away. They just mingle on the universal moodboard, a dechronologized stream of looks peddled at the algorithm bazaar by vibe-merchant accounts with handles like “soft__aesthetic“ or “vinyl.jpg.“

And Handel Gothic is most certainly a vibe. The vibe is a Star Trek sex scene, a Berlin-based high-end synth company, the sharp bite of a 02:00 am gin and tonic that jolts you awake from the club trance.

Of course, this is all hedonistic and shiny black and cool and if you’re wondering how Handel Gothic actually affords the rent, let alone the designer drugs and clothes, you’re thinking clearer than most. Handel Gothic is the child - the trust fund beneficiary, even - of our country’s great industrialists. It looks produced and regimented because it actually is. It is manufactured, perhaps in the same factories that make the products its advertised. Each letter is in effect one or two metal tubes, bent at the corners and soldered at the edges. The tubes’ width never changes, and they remain rigidly straight until a pneumatic pump shoots a piston forward, hammering a metal knuckle into the tube’s midsection over and over again until it’s been abusively articulated into a picture-perfect N.

This is all a far cry from Beth’s stereo. Don’t expect an explanation that ties it all together. The American monoculture was the shortest-lived non-Nazi empire in recorded history, and it’s now gone the way of the Dodo in a leisure suit.

There is no longer a core curriculum for how we consume things. Scott looks at Handel Gothic and sees his mother’s old stereo. He sees its age and it reminds him of his mother’s and he subconsciously knows that he needs to get rid of it now, while she’s still around, because if he has to carry it alone to the curb after she passes he might collapse under the weight of its memory. Wouldn’t a Sonos just be easier? And on one coast or another, a Nike creative director looks at Handel Gothic and sees the display text for an Instagram ad. She sees something quick and aggressive, something hyper-technical and cleanly masculine, a font that might finally justify her promotion to Menswear Creative Lead (not that it needs justifying to anyone but her).

We all see something a little different when we see Handel Gothic. What do you see?

One of those children’s books was Zeralda’s Ogre, in which a child-eating ogre kidnaps a little girl, only to swear off his cannibalism after eating the delicious food she cooks. It’s Grimms’ meets Shrek meets Lolita, a vivid dream that makes crystal-clear emotional sense but on retelling is nonsensical and, frankly, a little troubling.

The title for Zeralda’s Ogre is a hand-painted blackletter that’s equal parts scary and silly. It has a human comfort from being hand-painted, which pulls it clear of looking like the New York Times logo and makes it look more like a backdrop for a high-production-value puppet show.

This ominous and fantastical blackletter echoes the impact that illustrators like Tomi, Maurice Sendack, and Roald Dahl had on me as a child. Their books were emotionally ambiguous and without clear morals. Their worlds had legitimate artistic merit: they were personal, fully-rendered places that you wanted to go back to once the book was closed. These worlds had shadows hiding behind corners and children tumbling slowly through the sky and things you couldn’t name if you tried. When you were antsy at a restaurant and were given a cup of crayons to calm down, you could draw extensions of these characters and worlds. Each provided a creative source material, an aesthetic you could pull over your head and run around in.

Outside of these precious few books, the world of children’s media is saccharine, moralistic, glossy, and simple. Most stuff “for kids” bends down at the waist and talks at you in a sing-song voice. It does not give you an opportunity to imagine, let alone a world in which to do it. It asks you what your favorite _______ is, and when it doesn’t get an immediate response it stands up again and goes back to the adults.

Ungerer’s contrasting view of those adults up above (greedy, obscene, self-involved) and children (just, curious, beautiful) feels right, or at least more right than it is wrong. Like many recently-crowned adults, I have the frequent and unfortunate realization that I am, indeed, an adult. And I trust Ungerer because he sat down with me and my cousins at weddings and Thanksgivings and played with us and actually listened to what we said. So when I look at his work now, at my ripe young/old age, I feel a little scared. Am I the pedophilic ogre now, or the wicked robber, or the bankrupt banker? I don’t have the time or spirit to think these thoughts in festive, hand-drawn lettering. They are concerned, 12 point, single-spaced Times New Roman affairs printed in triplicate for diary, friends, and therapist.

After all these years, Tomi’s finally got me scared.

Carrie applies messiness like mascara. But you cannot put pig on a makeup. After all, Carrie likes to shop alone at the Container Store. She rumples her button ups before French Tucking, and then un-French Tucking, and then re-French Tucking at a new angle that hopes desperately to look like the first choice.

Carrie’s apartment is objectively chic. The eye is met by a rakish melange of MoMA store tchotchkes laid out just so, like dots in colorblind test illustrations. Somewhere in this flat mat of perfectly-clicked-in-to-place rainbow gumdrops should be a family photo.

Keep looking.

The Things are all very comfortable things, with straight lines and curved edges and matte finish and an overall sheen of “I’m cute and I’m capable.” And if you asked how they got so capable they’d explain their history of teenage service-industry jobs, and you’d nod in agreement because honestly… everyone sorta needs to have one as a kid, right?

The summer job was a good idea.

Carrie did (and does) not have as many friends as people would think. She looks good, and good implies attractive, and attractive implies that people are attracted, and that implies they actually follow through on that attraction and, you know, hang out with Carrie. But it’s never quite that easy, is it?

So her parents thought it would be a great way for Carrie to make friends. “People say ‘it’s like shooting fish in a barrel,’” Carrie’s dad said, “because ‘making friends your age at a beach town ice cream shop in August’ is a tongue-twister.” In the end, she was too tall for the kids her age, just young enough for the older boys, and too too for the older girls.

She did learn, however, to always sprinkle a little salt on her ice cream.

While Carrie hates Midnight in Paris (Owen Wilsons talking like Woody Allens represent 80% of all her exes), her ideal trip would be going back to 1920s Paris. But she wouldn’t stammer her way through it like that Texan Himbo. She would have known what was happening the second it happened. And she would have been perfect for it. She would have charmed the writers and inspired the painters and been so magnetic that the French would be embarrassed that they couldn’t speak her language. And she’s always had the body for a flapper dress.

She said as much to her therapist. They’d been talking about why she has a hard time traveling - why it makes her so tense. Her therapist had asked what her dream vacation was.

“Oh that makes sense,” Dr. Applebaum said, “that makes sense.” Carrie felt seen, and somewhat approved of. It was nice to know that her aesthetic was a fit for such a glamorous time. And honestly, it was just nice to agree with someone.

“It makes sense that you’d want to travel back in time all alone,” Dr. Applebaum said. And suddenly Carrie didn’t feel quite so seen anymore.

Raisonné can be purchased here.

As always, images and inspiration are pulled from fontsinuse.

You just noticed, 10 minutes after welcoming him in and gesturing to the bed for coats and bar cart, that Raisonné’s outfit is impeccable. It’s a proper outfit, one that starts with the body and drapes a more perfect form around it. The layers never repeat and always respond. It is personal, proportional, and unburdened by the anxiety of sartorial risk.

Part of the appeal of his outfit is that it doesn’t invite introspection. It is not a mic-drop or highlight reel, so seeing it doesn’t make you consider your own response. In the absence of that self-interest, a positive feedback loop of observation builds. Looking makes you feel good, so you look more, feel better, and on. You stumble out of the loop with a compliment whose specificity, you hope, might reflect some of Raisonne’s taste onto your own.

Raisonné does well amongst other creatives. Not that Raisonné would ever call himself a “creative.” Raisonné is a font, is proud to be a font, and in response to “what do you do?” would say, without hesitation or a nervous flit of the eyes, “I’m a font.” Being able to find a comfortable place within greater, high-aesthetic design efforts is perhaps his greatest strength. The guy’s resume isn’t long - ambition, after all, is often a failure of self-confidence - but it is of high quality.

Doing the dishes that night with your partner, your debrief hits a lull. Whose turn is it to pick a topic? You submit: “I loved Raisonné’s ‘fit tonight.”

“Oh my god yes. Yes! I was thinking, like, ‘You could be the gallery owner or the artist on display and I wouldn’t be surprised by either.‘“

“Complete 50/50 of maturity and expression.”

“Wasn’t it kinda like… Tár-like?”

“Mmmmmm is it an ‘I have an accent mark in my name’ thing?”

“Honestly….. maybe.”

“You get sorta misled by how tame the look is. But then it’s like… the acute line terminals…. the ratio of the top and bottom of the S… the lower bout of the g -”

“THE LOWER BOUT OF THE LOWERCASE G. YES. YES. OH MY GOD THE LOWER BOUT OF THE LOWERCASE G.”

Pause. Beat.

“Can we thrift sometime? Like something like Raisonné-y / Tár-y or whatever”

“I’m down. You know I’m not that fun to thrift with though and you have so much thrift stamina. I’m down though. Like maybe we can just sync up at the end or something."

Pause. Beat, beat.

Kiss. Squeeze.

Rinse, stack. Kiss.

Like siblings, fonts of a typeface will often finish each others sentences. They’ll have long conversations comprised entirely of inside jokes. Their voices match in pitch and cadence, having come together over the years like a string section tuning before an overture. They’ll talk over each other yet still hear each other perfectly.

Take, for example, the Druks. They gab back and forth like bottles clanging in the recyling bin. "Conversation" isn't quite the right word for it. The individual voices are almost irrelevant. It's only through their syncopated clater that what they're really trying to say - "I love you guys" - comes through.

If the Druks are the Safdie brothers, the Syncros are the Coens. They are more measured and paced, giving each other space and letting their story breathe.

Crossing the language barrier

Even for our most literate friends, the sped-read-every-Harry-Potter-the-day-it-came-out Bar Trivia All Stars, there is a universally inescapable gap between seeing and reading. These milliseconds are a font's playground. This is when it establishes its way of being in the world: a posture and gait that you'd recognize from across the street with your glasses off. A pitch and laugh that you could make out in a Chinese restaurant on Christmas.

This way of being is a font’s “timbre.”

Timbre's immediacy is extralingual: while a font cannot speak every language, it can make itself understood regardless of language. To be clear, a font's timbre can only make itself understood. Not an arbitrary message - that would be speaking.

Typically that's a bit limiting. "Hi, I'm _______" is a name tag, not a conversation. But from time to time, fonts get to meet their foreign cousins: fonts with a inherited common timbre who, for one socioeconogeopoliticohistorico reason or another, ended up in a different language. This is when the sparks really fly.

Below is a booklet for an exhibition studying the connection of kanji, hiragana, katakana and Latin characters in Japanese writing.

These writing systems converge like families seeing each other at the hotel check-in before a wedding. While you can immediately tell the American cousins, the Chinese cousins, and the Japanese cousins apart, there's a clear family resemblance.

To the left, the cover's austere characters speak like middle-aged siblings catching each other up on their travels. Their timbre: thin strokes with hemispheric terminals, patient arcs, tidy corners, airy spacing.

The characters to the right are their neices and nephews. They run around whispering secrets, bouncing off walls. And while they may be shouting aparent nonsense they somehow do it in lockstep, rising and falling together as if pulled by the same string.

International font families often reflect their real geopolitics. Judaism is a historically diasporic religion, which makes Hebrew's survival all the more impressive. Its persistence has been thanks to its ability to assimilate into another culture without diluting its own. Take, for example, American Jewish literature, whose pages are typically split vertically like stone tablets: a Hebrew side and an English side.

Below is a 1970s inflight menu from El Al, Israel's national airline, shares that bilingual symmetry. The brand's entire visual identity was designed from the start to be inclusive and graceful in its handling of Latin and Hebrew characters. The Hebrew and English letters mirror each other perflectly in both the layout of the overall text and the composition of each letter.

Blur your eyes and ears and take in the menu and plane. Cut through the cigarette smoke and make out the accent found in Palm Beach, Haifa, Bensonhurst, and Munich. This is a melodic, heavy-throated voice millenia in the making.

No question receives as inadequate an answer as “how was it?” to a slow-thinking, blissed-out, directly-post-acid friend in the early evening hours after their trip. Their meandering memories are unordered, epiphanies inarticulate, warmth radiated out and smoked up like the incense they toppled over stumbling up to stretch.

In their baked and fuzzy haze, thoughts become tantric mantras: abstract, unarguable phrases chanted until they achieve natural truth. If printed on a natural fiber tee tumble-wash-eroded to a roughsoft nap, or a bumper sticker faded dry by road trips through All-American deserts (Vermont winter, Texas tumbleweed, Joshua Tree summer, Brooklyn asphalt), those mantras would be rendered in Hobo.

Hobo has, above all else, a flared flair. She is natural, organic, softly undulating. You can, if you go slowly enough to fit in the spliffs and deep conversations and naps, hike in bell bottom Lees. Hobo does. It’s dyed in her wool, after all. Hobo’s parents, those wonderful old hippies, will leave her a cash-poor inheritance comprised largely of one-of-a-kind hand-me-downs in corduroy, canvas, denim and leather.

Hobo always seems to be hanging around some new group. Maybe its because she’s easy going, though she worries it's because of her copious hallucinogen intake. She makes fast friends waiting at the bar, smoking a cigarette outside, and in line at the club. With these new friends her soft smile rarely parts to push words through, merely pursing and curling in response to the conversation around her.

Hobo enjoys drugs, she half-heartedly self-assures while trudging through dopamine valleys, because receiving feeling is the truest form of honesty. The bitter cynicism lurking behind Hobo's fears is that she's merely a ripe target for projection. After all, isn’t her soft, smooth brain the perfect palette for the soaring emotional arcs of a trip? And her sincere and silent tight-lipped smile, allegedly beautiful - isn’t that just a safe haven for the hurt souls who seek her audience?

Jeez, that was a long trip. Hobo pauses, thumbing through her last 6 hours - happy, sad, radiant, shivering, lost, found, stretched, and now contently - truly contently - wrung out.

“How was it?” you ask again.

“Ohhhh, you knoooow,” replies Hobo, her arcing tone harmonizing with the past day’s still-reverberating feelings. “How are you?” she deflects.

Shatter's rib cage pokes through their pale skin. Any fat Shatter once had was burned long ago from sweaty nights dancing and muscles shivering and thoughts spinning so fast that Shatter forgot to eat. Shatter is completely burnt, gnashing and grinding until the friction rips them into ash and smoke and acrid fumes.

Before falling face-first onto sharp rails of cocaine that Shattered them into jagged shards, they were a clean, orderly, crisp Helvetica. Looking at their pieces, angled forward and stuttering back, Shatter’s particularly handy and hopeful friends imagine they can put Shatter back together. Maybe they can. Never perfect, never seamless, never like they were - that Eden is gone - but together in some comfortable, human sobriety.

Some who have already tried to help, though, aren’t so sure. “The breaks might be too clean and complete,” they worry in hushed tones, “and I’m not sure there’s a surface for the glue to hold on to and bring Shatter back together.” If they’re right, if Shatter’s anxious feedback loop has become debilitatingly defeaning, the only way to quiet Shatter might be by unplugging them altogether. Full lobotomy.

For now, Shatter will remain suspended in the cracked acrylic amber of their panicked mania. A breaking point - one we try not talk about anymore - brought about their Shattering. One day, God willing, another will bring about their Recovery.

The modern cannabis consumer/connoisseur (MCC/C) knows there are three key data points (3-KDPs) to evaluate when selecting a giggle grass to mellow their harsh: delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (Δ-9-THC), CBD (CBD), and, crucially, brand identity.

Thanks to its wide popularity, weed has developed a moderate categorical diversity that gives consumers a feeling of control without the burden of creation. Run your eyes over the selection on the shelf: whispy scripts centered over washed out pastels, matte black blocks drilled into glossy precious metal, merry old tattoos inked on tan paper.

Why the schisms in window dressing? Boomers bought things. Millennials bought experiences. Now, young folks purchase states of being - ideally visible ones. It’s natural for consumers to come of age, after all. Weed has. Marijuana’s polyamorous relationship with private equity and Pentagram design has led it to embrace its professional Brand Identity: relaxed, coherent, attractive, and pristine.

If only those promises came true. Like drinking with your parents, smoking is fun in theory and hilarious in stories. But in reality, few are cool enough to do it without feeling a touch off. Both happened most in college, at high school grad parties, Thanksgivings back home, and second cousins’ weddings. They were narcotics to dull the lonely, low-grade pain that started acting up after flying (falling?) out of the nest.

There is no singular font for weed because weed has fully entered the public forum: a buyer’s market (confused, inebriated, unsatisfied buyers), and thus a marketer’s market. It is defined by the surface-level diversity pulling it in every direction and, ultimately, nowhere

This article is only possible becase of fontsinuse. You can find most of these fonts and images - and many more - listed there.

Moore Computer (they/them) was part of a wave of fonts designed to be detected by magnetic ink character recognition (MICR). You know the first one, E-13B, which is the numbers-only font that lets machines read the digits at the bottom of your checks. Its imbalanced spacing, right angles, square holes and tumorous strokes started as a practical necessity but grew to be a symbol of "technology."

Somewhere between then and now, though, that image got flipped on its head. Moore Computer, once a vision of modernity, now speaks completely in the retro tense. How?

When viewed at a glance, a distant point on the horizon might resemble the future. But as time moves forward, that point comes nearer and nearer until one day you're looking at it in the unflattering, skin-wrinkling, belly-bloating rearview mirror. Fonts that articulate “the future” as a specific design inevitably meet this fate. Their vision for an upcoming reality may turn out right or wrong, but either way it turns out and fades away. Moore Computer is our witness.

Predicting the future is hard work, though, and should be left in the professional hands of storefront psychics and insider traders. Once Moore Computer was released from the burden to be right and now, they were able to be themself

.When I see Moore Computer hawking their wares in vintage Etsy stores and posing for selfies on '70s IG moodboards, I see a playfulness that was missing when they were the spokesperson for computer manuals and appliance advertisements. Their value isn't conditional on their technical abilities - people love them for who they are.

Life moves fast and technology moves faster. It's a rare gift that Moore Computer was finally able to slow down and enjoy it.

Any given Saturday night, you'll find Recoleta in her bedroom (second floor, left of the stairs, if you hit the picture of Grandma and Grandpa in college you've gone too far). She's imagining a chiller life. Or maybe it's just different. But it certainly doesn't have the Common App website or follower counts or numbers at all for that matter. And certainly certainly not Tim.

Recoleta may have been designed in the TikTok generation, but she was born in the wrong era. The 60s were for her. Or was it the 70s? When was Fleetwood Mac? Well… any of those times would be better than now. There'd be neighborhood kids, no one would ask her about college, she'd fit in, and days would pass like movie montages

.Recoleta's type face is a spitting image of the fonts she looks up to. That angled stroke in her lowercase “e” - that's pure Windsor. Her rounded strokes and nib-y serifs could've been bought from Cooper Black's Depop page. At lighter weights, she has a unaffected glamour that borders on waifish. At heavier weights, she flips to the other side of the juvenile coin and trades muted disinterest for unbothered goofiness.

Like so many modern fonts in her generation, Recoleta is torn between a thousand things and she's expected to do it all. She needs to make sense printed on Instagram self-care how-to's, thrift shop totes, and start-up dentists offices. Whatever happened to just letting fonts be kids? These code switches can be tiring for a young font still finding its own voice. So tiring, in fact, that Recoleta doesn't notice the skill she displays in making them.

If only she knew what her parents' friends say about her. How engaging she is. How she listens better than anyone her age should know how. And so elegant, too.

She'll get there soon.

Egyptienne (he/him) peaked late. Not a 5th-year-senior, “I know all the moves,” slippery, suave, "alright, alright, alright" late peak. Egyptienne was a foreign exchange student from another time, lucky enough to be well received but never totally understood.

No one is quite sure when Egyptienne was born - some say 1820, others 1851. Egyptienne was designed in the time before birthdays, when people were too busy toiling in fields and being generally itchy to write down a birthdate. But after a century and a half in the flip-over pages of typeface catalogs, Egyptienne moved to the big city and blew up. All of a sudden, it was on album covers and movie posters and newsstands.

Why? Egyptienne is bold and self-assured. It has enough character to be interesting at large sizes. And yet it remains readable at small ones. When the Dutch celebrate Sinterklaas on Sinterklaas Eve, they give each other large chocolate bars in the shape of their initials. Egyptienne is typically the font. It's fun enough to fit a festive spirit, but legible enough to be printed in industrial quantities of melty, waxy chocolate.

Egyptienne reminds me of the suits men wore to the office in the 70s. While still formal, they were bolder than the white collar workwear of previous decades: wider lapels, flared legs, brighter colors. This balance between restrained formality and fashion-forward creativity makes sense in the contexts Egyptienne thrived: the covers of hip social commentary magazines like New York Magazine and Fact. Intellectual but provocative, cerebral but visceral.

It's a good thing he waited those 150 years - when his time came, Egyptienne was a perfect fit.

This article is only possible becase of fontsinuse. You can find most of these fonts and images - and many more - listed there.

When you read text in Pilowlava, the first thing you read is Pilowlava itself. Its bulbous strokes jut out with a haphazard and syncopated rhythm, and you've got to read it several times before you can tap your foot to it. Eventually you parse out its alphabet. There's a P, that's a W, what an interesting way to write an I. Only then do you actually read it. 

And in that latency between perceiving it and engaging with it, Pilowlava's attempt to communicate is lost. 

These days self-actualization is tense and high-stakes, which makes Pilowlava’s effortless ability to express itself all the more impressive. It's great for applications where establishing and explaining oneself is the only goal: a sour beer's label, an upscale headshop's logo, a Pratt student's endearingly overdone design portfolio. But once the sentence doesn't look like "I am ______", Pilowlava fumbles over its words. The letters don’t quite fit in the eye and don't string together in a sentence. When viewed as a large body of text, they may as well be hieroglyphics.

That’s the tradeoff inherent in Pilowlava, the unrealized potential at its core. Such a clear voice, but with so little to say.

You can download Pilowlava for free here. You should donate tho.

Averia Serif's designer had a vision - that's obvious. Under caving-in ceilings, in a used book store somehow dry and musty, among 2007 LSAT prep books and Kurt Vonnegut reprints, lies a library of pages at various stages of yellowing. The Averia Serif letters printed onto them are at a glance regular but ultimately imperfect. Any description other than "booky" feels partial and technocratic. Averia Serif is steeped in literary history: comfortable, human, personal.

But it's not. Averia Serif was generated by averaging all the glyphs on its creator's computer. It is an automated product: completely indifferent, lazily magnanimous, and the lack of intention in letter and spirit. It is brown, static noise, Switzerland in wartime. 

That's the best part.

Typefaces promise that you can fit in and still be yourself. To have a life, they must conform to legibility. But to justify it, they must be unique. No typeface does this better than Averia Serif. It's defined entirely through its relationship with its peers, yet speaks with a particular, self-assured voice.

You can download Averia Serif here.

In my high school, hallways were wallpapered with edutaining posters about the uncanny numeric patterns of the natural world. Fibonacci, spiraling seashells, branching tree limbs. Like an English teacher rapping Shakespeare, these posters pled that math transcended #2 pencils and study hall. They promised that it was vital, exciting, and essential.

From what I've gathered, mid-century modern design is supposed to transcend in the same way. Chairs are not just chairs but tulips. Tables are lily pads. Lamps are the very concept of light itself. As an aesthetic argument it’s pretentious but reasonable. 

Look around, though - mid-century modern has transcended beyond even the natural world to perhaps the purest realm known to man: social status. Design objects have become fetishes. Not a tulip-like chair, but a Saarinen Tulip Chair by Knoll. All that matters now is commercial and cultural context.

As Forma attests, this was always the case. In 1965, a major type foundry commissioned a team of 8 designers "to develop a more mature, humane interpretation of the Swiss sans serif trend." In other words, they wanted their Helvetica - the commercial runaway hit that defined the past decade's aesthetic - but updated to respond to a decade of complaints about Helvetica's legibility and uniformity. Starting with Helvetica as the base, Forma:

• has strokes with a slight flare (check the F)

• has lower case letters with taller bodies and shorter stems (more legible)

• has impressively tight letter spacing - it feels like a freshly straightened desk

• has some characters, like the lowercase "e", that are tweaked to be more distinct from other letters (again, more legible)

But to the non-nerds, what's important is how Forma fits into (say it with me)  its commercial and cultural context. It's Helvetica enough to get on the shelf, and different enough to be bought off it (which you can do here).

This article is only possible becase of fontsinuse. You can find most of these fonts and images - and many more - listed there.