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.
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.
Corporate Image in the Alphabet Innovations Collection, Vol. 4, 1971. Courtesy of Stephen Coles.
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.
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.
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!
So, today marks 10 years since I launched my type foundry, which coincided with the release of my font Gimlet.
I’m not great commemorating things like this (or introspection about my process in general 😅), but it did feel worth mentioning. It’s difficult to overstate how grateful I am to the folks at Font Bureau who encouraged and supported me as I took the leap back in 2016, and to the customers, club members, friends, mentors, and font lovers who have made it possible for me to make the fonts that I want to make ever since.
Most of my early fonts were “synthesis fonts” that blended different influences within a genre, but Gimlet was my first type design to be in direct conversation with a single source: Georg Trump’s Schadow.
Nick Sherman was the person who first urged me to tackle Schadow, and he and Indra Kupferschmid acted as my guides as I unpacked the multifaceted design and reimagined it as a contemporary quirkhorse.
While display type has trended towards “more attitude” over the past 10 years, I feel like text typography has actually moved in the opposite direction.
Gimlet makes the argument for a judicious helping of attitude across the board, from text to display. It’s something I’d love to see more of in contemporary type palettes.
Gimlet is not one of my most-used text faces, but it remains one of the families I am most proud of.