May’s Font of the Month: Megavolt Narrow

Sextile concert poster by Julia Fletcher
A few years ago, designer Julia Fletcher made excellent use of my Megafonts in a series of posters for the band Sextile. Julia specializes in making daring and playful poster art for musicians, and I am a big fan of the way she uses type, color, and pattern in her work.
But you might have noticed something about the poster for the Brooklyn show, displayed above. Megavolt is by far the widest of the megafonts, and the way that Julia made it work for her design was to horizontally scale it by 43%.
Now you might be thinking…don’t type designers hate it when their fonts get stretched and squished? And yeah, a lot of times it does look pretty bad—squishing tends to distort curves and muddle the relationship between thicks and thins in the typeface.
But Megavolt has the benefit of being 100% curve-free, and Julia squished it so much that it actually retains three distinct stroke weights: thick horizontals, thin verticals, and an even thinner diagonal on the E. So even though it became horizontal stress in the process, it still feels typographically sound to me.

Julia’s use of Megavolt got me thinking. Why did I made the typeface so wide in the first place? I probably did it because I thought it looked cool. But in a design that is already so stylized, isn’t making it super-wide kind of a hat on a hat? It’s not a very usable design to begin with, but wouldn’t it be that much more usable at a more conventional width?
And this is why this month I’m sending you Megavolt Narrow.

I started out by following in Julia’s footsteps and squished the heck out of the original design. Megavolt was built around a consistent angle (54° in the original) that is used to form right trapezoids in many of the letters. In this new version, it is a much steeper 19°. I then restored the vertical stress by making the vertical strokes significantly thicker and the horizontal strokes a bit thinner.
I also took this opportunity to significantly beef up Megavolt’s offering of OpenType alternates. In my original write-up, I compared the experience of making the typeface to playing with puzzles and tangrams. With these new alternates, my hope is that the experience of using the typeface will have that same sense of play. If the user can mess around with a bunch of combinations of verticals and diagonals, they can find the right balance for their headline or wordmark.
Playing with toy blocks often involves flipping and rotating them to find the right fit. The original Megavolt only contained right-leaning (ascending) diagonals, but this new version has a set of new stylistic sets to introduce more left-leaning (descending) diagonals into the mix. This means that there are now four O’s, representing the four possible orientations of that trapezoid.

You’ll also find more square forms, more unicase forms, other random alternates, and a set of descending swash capitals that can be used at the beginning and end of the word (a.k.a. EndcapS or MetallicapS).
I’m still playing with these alternates, and have yet to make accents for all of them or explore every permutation....when you get into alternates of alternates, the glyph set grows quickly! I’ve roughly organized them in OpenType Stylistic Sets, but honestly, you might be better off just pulling them from the Glyphs palette or tooltips, like pulling blocks from a bin of toys.

I was taught that typography is a relationship between type maker and type user, and I like the idea that we type designers can do better than scolding users when they squish our fonts. A squished font is an opportunity to reflect on the limitations of what our typefaces can do, and what we can add or change about them to meet our users’ expectations and needs.