In Forma DJR Mono, Italian designer Ruggero Magrì has taken my revival and brought it in harmony with the limitations of the monospaced grid. On its own, it excels at conveying technical data with clarity and poise; paired with its proportional cousin, it is the perfect option for charts, graphs, and tabular data. It strikes a distinctive tone, preserving the warmth of Forma DJR with inky, rounded corners, while never making you feel like it was produced by a typewriter.
Visit djr.com/forma-monoto see more specimens, download the free trial and free student license, and purchase discounted or full licenses for your professional work.
Megabase is my personal favorite of the Megafonts, even if is not as widely used as Megazoid and Megascope. I am a sucker for horizontal stress (asyoumightknow) and I appreciate its space-age funkiness and the playful up-and-down of its vertical alignments.
But I’ve been feeling some regret about a few decisions that I made back in February 2020 that I worry limit its usefulness (at least to the extent that one can think of a typeface like this as “useful” 🤪).
In particular, I’ve been concerned that Megabase’s thin stems and high stroke contrast made it too delicate, and therefore too difficult to work with in anything but the largest sizes. Don’t get me wrong…this is a display font, and the contrast is kinda the whole point. But I’ve found myself wishing that I hadn’t strayed quite so far from its chunky ancestors like Gothic Bold and Sintex.
So this month I’m sending you Megabase v3, complete with a weight axis that adds some sturdier, meatier options.
I don’t have a ton more to say about this design, so I hope you don’t mind if I keep this one brief. After all, this new addition was a simple transformation—take the thin vertical stems and make them thicker, and everything gets a little wider in the process.
I also chose to remove the rounded edges that were present in the original design. The softness felt unnecessary; the shapes are more expressive if they remain stark and abstract. Unfortunately, I didn’t save a version of the font before I added the corners and I couldn’t find a way to reliably automate it, so I had to remove them manually from every corner of every glyph. It took forever!
Finally, I added the same weight axis to Megabase’s Open style and accompanying color variable font. Like Nickel, it uses the primary color of your text for the base shape, and then a customizable color palette for the fill. By default, the fill is a semi-transparent shade, so it will react to whatever color or image is behind it.
You can play with Megabase’s variable axis, color palettes, and numerous OpenType alternates over at my new online typesetter (developed by Miniware, a longtime club member). I think this feels closer to what I’d like to eventually offer as a retail release for Megabase, but I’m certainly curious if there’s anything else you’d like to see.
Memory is an imperfect thing, and it can sometimes be jarring when my mental picture of a typeface doesn’t align with the real thing. I’ll never not be shocked by how different Times’s Bold is from its Regular, or how much narrower Helvetica’s f, j, and t are than my brain expects them to be.
I’ve now been making fonts long enough that I even experience this with my own designs. My typeface Roslindale started off in 2017 as a single Bold Condensed weight. In my mind’s eye, it was fairly narrow, maybe something along the lines of this:
But then I take a look at the font file and am surprised to see that Roslindale at its narrowest actually looks like this:
I could have sworn it was narrower!
I’ve spent a fair amount of time making this typeface wider and wider, but clearly my subconscious demands that I push it in the other direction and really put the squeeze on this design. So this month I’m sending you my first stab at Roslindale Display Compressed Bold, which goes as narrow as this:
I’ve also thrown in an intermediate Extra Condensed Bold for good measure, which leaves us with an array of widths that looks something like this:
Like the rest of the Roslindale family, this design takes major cues from the Victorian-era serif De Vinne. Narrow, space-saving versions of De Vinne began to pop up shortly following its release in 1890, including an Extra Compressed from Barnhart Brothers & Spindler, a separate-but-related typeface called Howland from Dickinson Type Foundry, and finally an Extra Condensed style offered by the newly-amalgamated American Type Founders (pictured below).
For me, the trick was to balance the funkiness of these historical sources with the smoother, slicker vocabulary of shapes that I’ve already established elsewhere in the Roslindale family.
Compressed fonts tend to take on a picket-fence regularity, with little room for oldstyle-influenced diagonal stress. I sought to preserve and even exaggerate that diagonal stress (see the sagging curves of c, d, and e and the sharp shoulders of m and n) at the same time that I was smoothing out out all of De Vinne’s lumps and bumps.
In other Roslindale news, I’m delighted to announce that the retail type family has a brand new web specimen! It was designed and produced by Typetura, and features interactive specimens, a breakdown of the family’s designspace, in-use examples, and a deep dive into the history of the Elzevir / De Vinne style (thanks to writing and research by Florence Fu and André Mora).
Last year I was approached by Caterina Piatti with an unusual request: she wanted me to design a typeface in honor of her great-grandfather. My type families rarely have anything to do with actual families, so I was intrigued!
Then she told me why: in July 1924, her great-grandfather Ottavio Bottecchia won the Tour de France, the first Italian to claim the honor. He was also the first rider in the history of the Tour to win with a start-to-finish sweep, leading each stage and possessing the coveted yellow jersey throughout the race.
This month, we mark the 100th anniversary of Ottavio Bottecchia’s historic win. So, with Caterina’s blessing, I’m sending you my first draft of the typeface that came out of her one-of-a-kind prompt. We decided to simply call it Ottavio.
Ottavio Bottecchia, images courtesy of Caterina Piatti.
This design is a bit outside of my comfort zone, and that’s probably a good thing. An issue I’ve found with my font-of-the-month format is that it can lead to a very goal-oriented approach to type design (“This month, I’ve designed x, a font that does y and is based on the historical model of z.”) Lately, I’ve been missing a more meandering, exploratory design process that gives a typeface time and space to percolate and figure out what it is actually about.
Caterina and I decided early on that Ottavio should not be a period piece, referencing the signs of 1920s Europe that her great-grandfather may have sped by as he rode to victory. And even though we bonded over our admiration for the work of Aldo Novarese, we decided that our typeface should not draw from the collection of dry-transfer gems that she has at Reber R41, the foundry that she operates.
Instead, what Caterina offered was a blank slate of sorts—an opportunity to freely explore shapes that had some connection to cycling, and more abstractly, the idea that an inherently unbalanced object can achieve balance through a sense of constant motion.
Ottavio’s letterforms are wide, open, and simple. It has a looser drawing style than I’m accustomed to, with broad, sweeping gestures, a humanist thick/thin axis, and stroke endings that are clipped at inconsistent angles. Its open terminals reach out into the space of adjacent letterforms, throwing letters like a and c out of balance. Typically-narrow letters like f and t are given extra space to complete their gestures. Diagonals like x and k are almost childlike in their simplicity, creating triangular counterforms that recall the shape of a typical bicycle frame.
After his win in 1924, Ottavio Bottecchia went on to win the Tour de France again in 1925. So between now and 2025, Caterina plans to use the typeface in a series of designs that celebrate the sport and the centennial of her great-grandfather’s contribution to it. Meanwhile, I hope to see the design continue to evolve as I push it into lighter and heavier weights. And I’m happy to incorporate your feedback too, if you have the occasion to try it out on something!
For several years, my wife Emily worked in a makerspace—a creative lab complete with 3D printers, a laser cutter, woodworking tools, etc. (She even fabricated our trail signs there, typeset in Zenith DJR.) During that time, she visited and toured a lot of makerspaces in the area, and sometimes I would tag along.
I still think about a workshop I visited where the instructor was laser cutting a text-based design into wood. He was disappointed to see the counterforms in his text getting obliterated in the process. Rather than choose a different font, he went back into Illustrator and manually created several dozen “bridges” that connected the counterforms to the rest of the negative space…what a pain!
That gave me new appreciation for the humble stencil font, which it turns out is just as practical and relevant in our digital world as it was a hundred years ago. So this month I’m sending you stencil cuts of Nickel and its sans serif counterpart Nickel Gothic, two fonts with rigidity and heft that lend themselves quite well to this treatment.
Since 95% of my work on this was subtractive, it was the perfect project for a hectic month. And I gotta say, it was also strangely therapeutic to take a thing I made in the past and spend a few weeks slicing and dicing it with a (digital) knife.
Stencil fonts offer an opportunity to play with the fuzzy line that separates shapes that register in our brains as letterforms and shapes that simply register as shapes. Making a stencil font nearly always involves breaking up letterforms into smaller pieces, but what is truly interesting about them is how that breaking apart gets done.
Some stencil fonts, such as ATF’s classic Stencil typeface, keep the larger letterform more or less intact, with small bridges that only briefly interrupt the connection from one side to the other. Others like Futura Black (or more recently Tick/Tock, Joschmi, and Joost Stencil) take a more Bauhausian approach and bring the letter’s constituent parts to the forefront, reducing and abstracting them to the point where it becomes a visual game to see the forest through the trees.
I tried to land Nickel’s stencil cuts somewhere in the middle, between the figurative and the abstract. It was an easy choice to make Nickel’s bridges predominantly vertical, since they follow the vertical axis of thicks and thins in the typeface. But it took some time to figure out what to do with their horizontal placement, and I’m pretty happy with the result.
Take the letter O for example. Most stencil fonts will slice their O right in the center to preserve its symmetry—in the case of ATF’s Stencil, this creates a connecting branch on both sides, and in the case of Futura Black, it eliminates the connecting branches entirely.
By shifting the bridge of Nickel Stencil’s O to the left, I end up with a lefthand shape that feels more abstracted, like Futura Black, and a righthand shape that feels more like a slice of a conventional letterform, like ATF’s Stencil. I made similar choices throughout both sans and serif versions of Nickel, shifting the bridges opportunistically to the left or right in order to achieve a mixture of figurative and abstract shapes.
I added bridges to pretty much every letter aside from single-column letters like I, l, i, and sometimes j, including letters that don’t have enclosed counterforms and technically don’t need bridges at all. In the physical world, a lot of these decisions come down to what material the stencil is made out of…in a metal or wood stencil, the open counterforms of E would probably be fine without bridges, but in a cardboard or paper stencil they would be far too flimsy and prone to breaking off. And in the digital world, these extra bridges help to unite all the letters with a common motif.
I spent a lot of time worrying about the spaces within letters, but not as much time worrying about the spaces between them. Especially in the serif, many letter combinations involving diagonals like KY or AA will touch. I originally devised a system of alternates that would simulate bridges between touching letters, but they impeded legibility and I found them to be too distracting for something that would only be useful in certain cases. So if you are making a physical stencil with a flimsy material, just add a little tracking! 😆
Whether you use them in a digital design, on a fancy laser cutter, or just with some cardboard and an x-acto knife, I hope that this sans/serif pair gives you an excuse to incorporate more stencils into your design practice. I’d be very curious to hear if you think it’s worth expanding this to Nickel Gothic’s wide and compressed widths, or if there are other fonts/styles out there that you’d like to see stencilified. Wishing you a wonderful month!
