It's hard to keep spacing even between all glyphs without creating different glyphs for all the combinations. Does it read as realistic and hand-written?
I think the "t" spacing makes it harder to read
Today we are announcing Fontalog - the world's biggest font database!
What is it? Fontalog is a searchable, super-fast, free database of fonts, created by FontBase. You can search fonts by visual characteristics, the same way you can do in our SuperSearch: proportion, contrast, weight and xHeight. On every font page there are multiple similar fonts displayed along with foundry info and exact parameter numbers, which you can use to search even more fonts.
How did we do this? No AI was used to create this. We analyze each font added to FontBase locally using the opentype.js library. We render the text off-canvas and measure key characteristics: stroke width; difference between bold and thin strokes; the relation of "x" letter height to capital letters; width of the letters compared to height; "i" size compared to "w" size. From these calculated numbers, we then build weight, proportion, xHeight and contrast. We also analyze the font's naming table to retrieve the basic info like font name, foundry and style names. No fonts are uploaded to our servers in the process.
Fontalog is constantly expanding as there are new fonts released and added to the database. We will monitor the website for performance and add new features moving forward. And as always we are open to feedback on how we can improve it!
Font of the week: Rot Iron
Forged in Fire. Claimed by Time.
Rot Iron is an ornamental display font inspired by the elegance of Victorian wrought ironwork—towering gates, ivy-covered fences, forgotten cemeteries, and hand-forged railings that have weathered generations beneath open skies.
Its foundation is rooted in clean gothic and foundational letterforms, but every character blossoms into elaborate flourishes, curling tendrils, sharp finials, and decorative foliage that feel as though they were forged in a blacksmith’s fire before slowly surrendering to rust and time.
There was something almost ritualistic about picking a typeface weight. You'd go through the type specimen, 300 feels too thin, 700 too loud, maybe 500 is the one. That decision had real stakes because you were committing.
Variable fonts removed the commitment. Now you can slide to 437 or whatever arbitrary value feels right in the moment, and there's no name for what you chose, no reference point, nothing another designer can replicate without the exact same file and settings. The craft of the decision got replaced by endless tweaking.
Which honestly might be fine for production work where you just need something to look right on screen. But for print, for editorial, for anything where another human needs to reproduce your choices, it introduces a weird ambiguity that nobody seems to talk about much.
The other thing is that type designers spent decades refining specific named weights. The jump from Regular to Medium in a wellmade family is a deliberate optical decision, not just a number change. When you drag a slider to sit between them you're not splitting the difference. You're often landing somewhere the designer never really intended or tested.
Curious if people working in print or with variable fonts day to day have run into this, or if it's just not actually a problem in practice.
I recently ported my TrueType/OpenType shaping and rendering library from JavaScript to Rust and got a demo running on a Cheap Yellow Display. The library can shape and render the most complex (living) sripts and it's super memory efficient so it can go where HarfBuzz and other shapers/renderers cannot.
The demo renders multiple TrueType/OpenType fonts with support for complex text layout, including Arabic, Nastaliq, Devanagari, Hebrew, Emojis and Latin ligatures.
The shaping, rendering and rasterizing is done entirely on the device with fonts downloaded from Google Fonts which stay stored directly in the ESP32’s flash memory. No pre-rendered glyphs or bitmap fonts are used.
Here is the demo's repository: https://github.com/waruyama/flattype-cyd-demo
Font of the week: Frosty
Where Winter Creeps Into Every Letter
Frosty is a gothic display font shaped by the quiet chaos of winter. Rather than relying on solid, rigid strokes, each uppercase letter is constructed from clusters of smaller marks that gather together like windblown snow, forming bold blackletter shapes with surprising depth and movement. Delicate flourishes branch outward like frost spreading across glass, giving every character the feeling of freezing in place the moment it’s written.
The lowercase alphabet leans even further into the illusion, with uneven strokes, subtle wavering forms, and elongated drips that recall hanging icicles and melting ice. The result is a blackletter style that feels organic, unpredictable, and beautifully weathered. Frosty is perfect for winter-inspired branding, fantasy artwork, album covers, apparel, posters, tattoos, seasonal designs, and any project that calls for gothic atmosphere wrapped in frozen elegance.
Hi guys
Just got an email from one of the biggest tech companies (think shopify, wix, webflow, squarespace) showing their interest in licensing one of our fonts in a perpetual, non-exclusive agreement with a one-time fee.
Their terms:
Font may be included in:
(i) the initial purchase/ download of the Services;
(ii) for individual purchase/ download within the Services;
(iii) as part of a subscription service/ download within the Services; or
(iv) as a part of a bundle of additional content and/or content for purchase/ download within the Services.
- Users of the Services may use what they make with your Font in any way they see fit for personal and commercial use.
- The Font may also appear in various promotional material that we use to advertise and display the Services.
- The files containing the Font are either incorporated/embedded into the Services and/or made available from a server, but we do not distribute the source file for the Font, i.e. the OTF or TTF files.
- A perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, fully paid, transferable, sublicensable right and license to upload, adapt, publish, modify, reproduce, copy, exhibit, publicly display, create derivative works of, distribute, sell, advertise, and otherwise use the Font, and the right to incorporate all or any portion of the Font in the Services in any form.
Can anyone share their experience with enterprise licensing of this scale? What terms to negotiate? How to base our pricing?
It's a full family with 8 weights.
Many thanks
had a nice display face but it looked loose and amateurish for no obvious reason — turned out to be tracking too open at large size, plus bad kerning on a couple pairs (looking at you, "To"). Tightened it up, fixed the worst pairs by hand, and suddenly it reads like it was designed instead of just typed. Nobody consciously notices — they just feel like it looks more expensive. Anyone else spend way too long on something 99% of viewers will never register?
I'm collecting typefaces with a mysterious, dark fantasy forest character. I'll be using them for a book, so they shouldn't be designed only for display or titles—they also need to work well as body text.
I'm drawn to typefaces that immediately create the feeling that something unsettling is about to happen. For example, you could write the word "WELCOME", but if the typeface has the right mysterious character, it no longer feels like a warm or reassuring welcome.
The fonts I've collected so far are close to what I'm looking for, but I feel they're missing a bit more personality. They tend to resemble one another quite a lot.
Can you think of any hidden gems?
As an independent designer, it's easy to second-guess every pixel when building a 124-page instructional book from scratch.
I spent months manually balancing line heights, custom slant angles, and stroke progressions specifically for a teen-to-adult audience (trying to avoid the childish aesthetic that dominates the category).
Woke up today to see it hit #47 in Typography on Amazon! Seeing a design-first approach actually perform against mass-market workbooks is a huge relief. For anyone else building detailed layout projects right now—keep tweaking the details, it matters!
For context, I‘m working on a startup that will make it easier to customers of font foundries to get purchased font files. I won’t say more to avoid self-promotion. Although I am wondering if the market is big enough for any business.
I know how I as an end user get fonts. I get a link to a place I can download them.
What I’m curious about is how this works for font foundries. How do foundries tend to get otf/ttf/woff2 files to a place they can be downloaded? Do they upload them through a website? Is there a service people tend to use? (I’ve seen some services use Shopify)
This is kind of a rhetorical question. I know it has to do with the origin of italics as a kind of calligraphy which didn't use this type of z (as I understand). I just think it'd be an interesting variation to see in an italic since you do often see things like using an f with a descender. Idk, thoughts? Also apologies if I got any terminology wrong, I'm still pretty new at this.
Hello! I've been working on this software for a few months, tested with my own work, and now I'm ready for some public feedback! I created typeset studio to solve the problem of typesetting and cover design, since other options I tried were out of my price range. It can also export full manuscripts to PDF and EPUB format. If you're interested in checking it out, I have it ready for windows OS with plans to expand to Mac in the future.
Working on a project right now where the subject matter is genuinely boring, think compliance documentation for a financial services company, but the client wants the brand to feel approachable and modern. Not playful, just not soulcrushing.
The tension is real. Go too expressive with the typeface and it undercuts the authority the content needs. Stay too neutral and you get something that reads like every other bank PDF from 2011
Right now leaning toward a geometric sans for headers that has just enough warmth in the terminals to soften things, paired with something slightly humanist for body copy. The combination feels like it could work, but it also feels like I'm just splitting the difference rather than making a real decision.
Curious whether anyone else has run into this and what the resolution looked like. Specifically interested in whether you pulled toward a typeface with some character and let the layout do the heavy lifting for seriousness, or went the other direction and let typographic hierarchy carry the personality
Also genuinely wondering if there's a class of type that solves this well that I'm not thinking about. The obvious picks feel too welltrodden at this point.
Recently, I completed a new typeface project called Qittchen.
It's a vintage font duo that combines a casual script with a soft ink heritage serif, designed for branding, packaging, editorial, logos, and other vintage-inspired applications.
I've attached a few preview images showcasing the typeface in different design contexts.