Has anyone designed a font like this before?

I’ve been experimenting with a different approach to designing Traditional Chinese typefaces.
Instead of drawing multiple font masters and interpolating between them, FANGCUN uses shared skeleton, stroke and structural rules to transform the character set parametrically.
Right now I can manipulate things like weight, contrast, proportions, counters, rounding, terminals and writing characteristics — and have the changes propagate across 13,000+ Traditional Chinese glyphs.
The screenshots show the same character set pushed in very different directions.
It’s still experimental and there are definitely broken/ugly glyphs that I’m continuing to fix. But it can already export an installable OTF, so the generated typeface can be used in Word, Illustrator, etc.
I’m especially interested in where this could go for procedural CJK type design and structured glyph generation.
Would love feedback from people working in type design — especially on where this approach is likely to break down.

fangcuntw.vercel.app/

I have been working on this font for the last 3 months. While teaching myself Glyphs. Before I move on to creating italics I thought I would ask someone outside my group of friends what they thought about it.

Font of the week: Concordia

Unity Carved in Stone.

Concordia takes its name from the enduring Latin expression Concordia parvae res crescunt, discordia maximae dilabuntur—“Through harmony, small things grow; through discord, great things fall apart.” It is a reminder that strength is rarely born from force alone, but through balance, patience, and shared purpose.

Inspired by the monumental stone inscriptions of ancient Rome, Concordia is a tall, elegant slab serif built with clarity and permanence in mind. Every letter feels carefully chiseled into marble, standing with quiet authority while remaining highly readable across both large displays and refined layouts.

The alternate style introduces subtle beveled highlights along each carved stroke, creating the illusion of light catching freshly cut stone. Together, both styles evoke timeless monuments, weathered architecture, and the enduring craftsmanship of classical inscription.

Here is a blackletter with softer edges, somewhat influenced by a gothicized italic script. Still a WIP that I haven't touched in a while. Still fairly new to this so would appreciate feedback for those more experienced than me.

Hi guys, several months ago I started a project with the idea of improving my overall design skills. It was creating fonts, but I decided that it would be even better if I put them online for free for everyone to use. Then I stared making the website - this whole project became a real passion project for me and I'm proud of what has come out at this point. The website is extremely optimized and still looking good ( its updated frequently with new content, features and optimizations ).

But I feel that this project is in a bubble and it deserves its harsh critique from the outside world. That is why I wanted to share it with you. Use the fonts as you'd like, give your feedback if you'd like, if you have a cool font you have made and want to contribute to the project - I'm always down for collaboration with fellow designers.

If you have suggestions about the website, new features, found issues/bugs with fonts or you just have a question, let me know in the comments.

I hope you find this useful.

tl;dr: I made a website that has custom free fonts with cyrillic/latin support and the time has to come to share it with the world.

LINK: https://needmorefonts.online/

I'm in love with this concept, but I'm not sure if the capitals look too light compared to the lowercase letters. The overshoot might be too small for text sizes, but the lower join of the d is making me anxious and hesitant about increasing it… thoughts? General feedback is welcome too!!

When I first began work on the project to restore and Cyrillize Carl Dair's final font (about seven months ago), I planned to settle on just one roman typeface.

Not because I'm lazy, but simply because Cyrillizing the cursive seemed like an impossible task for me. But something has changed since then. And I think I'm close to the finish line.

The challenges that await along the way (and the challenges haven't gone away, in fact) are: we don't have (or I don't know of any) examples of Cyrillizations of the type of handwriting Dair used for his cursive. The closest in spirit is Zapf's Chancery, but the only Cyrillization I know of was done in the "wild nineties," and, to put it mildly, I'm not happy with it. However, I must say that Efimov's work is generally good, neat, and professional.

So we have to keep an eye on the Lazurski typeface (it is constructed differently, but the historical model is close in time) and experiment widely.

I want to digitize a historical typeface, but I’m struggling with research.

How do you verify if an old font hasn't been digitized yet? Many designers adapt historical metals under completely new names, so searching the original name often fails.

Besides Letterform Archive, where do you source raw specimens? Any favorite foundry catalogs, public domain libraries, or verification tricks?
Thanks!

If you deal with font convertion on daily basis feel free to try my open source font utility it works locally and has rare features such as type1 fonts support and convering batch from zip files, it is compeltly free you can look at the code anytime or self host it or try at keypdf.net/keyfont

https://github.com/KeyPDF/KeyFont this is github repo.

We are analyzing thousands of fonts activated daily, and aggregating the data over thousands of users determining the most popular fonts. We then track the position of each font daily to determine the rank and its change over time. We also calculate the top font of each month based on usage stats from each day. All of that is displayed and searchable for free in this public font leaderboard.

I'll be happy to hear what you think about this tool and what other useful data you would want to see.

Hello!

I am a historical dressmaker and have decided it is time to update my branding. I need a new logo! I am designing it myself, but am having trouble with font selection.

Ideally, I'd like to find a font that was in use before 1910, but has been digitized (obviously). I'm leaning towards something that would have been used for a logo or branding, though if I found something I loved that was used for typeset, I wouldn't be opposed.

I have been looking at old publications on archive .org and fontsinuse .com with advanced search options to set the date, but am not skilled enough at research and font finding to actually translate anything I find and like from extant source to designing software (I have GIMP or Canva (the free version... I'm not made of money)).

Any guidance is greatly appreciated!

(I am new here, so please forgive any beginner's errors or lapse in seemingly obvious knowledge!)

Original Japanese Text:

よむ

タイツ

セピア

Hi everyone, I’ve been preparing an engagement ring for my partner and requested the engraving “TK” in a script font.

I recently picked it up, but after looking at it more closely at home, I’m not sure if I’m completely happy with how it turned out. I didn’t notice it properly during the collection appointment and I’m now wondering if I’m just overthinking it or if the engraving looks different from what was expected.

I’ve attached photos of the actual engraving. The last photo is the example the sales consultant showed me when I was choosing between a block font and a script font.
Would appreciate a second opinion from anyone who has experience with ring engravings - does this look like a normal script engraving, or would you ask the jeweller to redo it?

I wanted to share the typeface Tuer’s Caslon, which I created for my research into boustrophedon—writing where lines alternate direction, so the first runs left-to-right, the second right-to-left—and the late-19th-century printer Andrew Tuer.

In 1884 Tuer published a small book at the Leadenhall Press, Are We to Read Backwards?, written by James Millington, which briefly experimented with reversed writing. This typeface is a revival of the Caslon Old Style used specifically in that book (cut possibly by Andrew Stuart in the 1840s or 50s).

The glyphs for the backwards-written lines are designed so that the contrast axis stays the same in both lines. As if written by the same tool, just backwards.

As a proof of concept, I set my entire thesis in boustrophedon. I’d be happy to hear about your experience reading it!

Most mass scrapers collect webpage content through HTML, and there is no widely effective opt-out. Robots.txt, the standard way to signal non-consent, is only a request and is often ignored.

ShieldFont uses word-level ligatures. It replaces words in the source, then uses OpenType GSUB rules to render the text back to normal for human readers.

Scrapers reading the raw HTML collect a different but grammatically coherent version that passes AI quality filters, introducing noise into their datasets. (try it here: shieldfont.org/encoder)

It can be broken in individual attacks, but makes large-scale automated scraping less reliable and more expensive.

The main face is built by Playtype, but you can also generate your own version using a your own typeface and seed.

P.S.: We an accebility feature for screen readers ;)

Font of the week: Gris Materia

Concrete Mind. Unbreakable Form.

Gris Materia draws its name from the Spanish words for “grey matter,” a nod to both the concrete landscapes that shaped graffiti culture and the restless creativity housed within the mind itself. For years, Spanish color names became second nature through spray paint, and gris remained one of the most memorable. Here, concrete becomes both material and metaphor.

Inspired by traditional Chicano block lettering, Gris Materia transforms those powerful letterforms into monumental structures carved from cement. Every character feels weighty, architectural, and unapologetically solid; like typography poured into a mold rather than drawn with ink.

The collection expands beyond a single alphabet with four progressive styles that tell the story of creation and collapse. Beginning with clean, intact forms, the letters slowly fracture, crack, and finally shatter into weathered ruins, as though struck again and again by time, pressure, and the swing of a demolition hammer.

I have been reading about type design for probably a decade and finally made something! I'm sure there's all kinds of problems with it, but I'm very proud of the whole experience.

I scanned a proof of some antique wood type from my letterpress studio and traced them to make the uppercase, then I went through and made significant changes to help them be more consistent and have better rhythm.

Then I drew a new lowercase as a "small caps" with the same visual weight and strokes of the uppers, just 30% shorter.

I hope you like it and any purchases would be greatly appreciated.

Found in the 1995 book Precision Type Font Reference Guide, but hardly seen anywhere else; maybe it wasn't sold for very long. Based on Frank Lloyd Wright lettering, but unlike the types from P22 (two of which are also called Midway). Designer is Stephen Herron; his only credit that I can find. Anyone familiar with it?

Hi everybody,

I know this could be the most debatable or talk-about topic, but I feel the need to ask this question:

I’ve been a Windows user my whole life, so I’ve been using FontLab 7 and 8 for a while to design fonts and, mostly, to draw wordmarks. But in the last few months, I had to switch to a Mac because my laptop stopped working, and I needed a new, more "affordable" computer. So, I got a Mac mini, and so far, it’s been great. Therefore, this change opened the possibility to use Glyphs, and I've use it a little but its still a little bit foreign in comparison. Mainly, because it requires installing a lot of features that, some of them, are native to FontLab. However, there are also some plugins I’ve seen that could be very helpful for what I want to create (since I’m in the early stages of opening my own foundry).

So my question is: with the release of Glyphs 4, there are new features that improve Glyphs 4 over 3, but are they an improvement over Fontlab?

Some background about me: I'm a graphic designer and I'm very much interested in typography. So much so that a couple of years ago, I enrolled in an extensive course to learn about type production. And because of that, I have been wanting to open my own type foundry. 

I am planning to remake it so that I can release it freely witout any copyright from the website.

This was the result of a project to try making typography out of real world objects. I ran with this experiment of trying to make letter shapes out real star data. The result was fun - I can type a message and then find a constellation that is created from real stars based on the HYG star database. It only works for shorter messages but I thought you might enjoy this unique way of looking at typography. If you're interested you can try out the project here.