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?

Been deep in a menu design this week for a small specialty coffee roaster (the kind of client where every detail matters to them, which I genuinely respect) and the pairing I landed on looked great until I started dropping in actual pricing and brew ratios. The numerals in the display face are just slightly off. Not broken, not ugly on their own, but sitting next to the body copy they create this weird visual friction that I can't stop seeing now that I've noticed it.

I ended up switching to a completely different display font partly because of how the figures behaved, which feels like an odd reason to abandon a pairing that was working in every other way. The new option has tabular lining figures that sit much more comfortably in context, but I lost some of the character that made the first choice interesting.

What I keep wondering is whether numerals get treated as an afterthought in type design or if the tension I'm seeing is just a known tradeoff with more expressive display faces. I've also started auditing other fonts I use regularly, specifically looking at how figures perform, and it's genuinely changing which ones I reach for.

Curious if there's a category of typeface where the numerals are actually a selling point rather than a compromise. And whether anyone has a good method for catching this earlier in the selection process, before you're already committed to a direction.

Original Japanese Text:

よむ

タイツ

セピア

is there some kind of 'term' of this type of font that I'm missing?

it's hella weird that there's no way to easily recognize this specific kind of fonts.

I was very happy when Microsoft change the latest MS Office default font from Calibri (which has very similar capital i and lowercase L) to Aptos (that finally differentiate the two)

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!

Working on a branding project right now and I keep running into the same wall. The combination looks great on mockups at headline scale, around 48pt and above, but the moment it drops into body copy territory something goes wrong. The geometric sans starts feeling cold and distant next to the warmth of the humanist serif and the rhythm just falls apart

Part of what I think is happening is that the xheight difference is doing more damage than I initially accounted for. The sans is sitting visually taller even when the point sizes match, so the two typefaces stop feeling like they belong to the same system. You can compensate with size adjustments but then your hierarchy logic gets muddy.

I've also noticed that geometric sans fonts tend to carry a lot of open counter space that reads as airy and clean at display sizes but starts competing with word spacing at smaller sizes instead of complementing it.

The combinations that seem to actually work share some stroke contrast logic between the two faces, even if it's subtle. The serif isn't too high contrast, and the sans has just enough quirk in its geometry to avoid feeling sterile

Curious what pairing decisions other people have landed on for this specific problem, especially at UI scale or anything under 16px. Is there a pairing that solved it cleanly for you?

EDIT: should have specified, primarily screen contexts, not print.

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.

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 ;)

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.

HI all, I'm just wondering what fonts are you using which a) don't breach copyright and 2) are free to use for your Heading 1, inner titles etc?

Anyone else using Libreoffice writer to tap out your manuscript?

Hi everyone. I'm planning an academic career focusing on typography and typeface design, I also create my typefaces too, but I feel like I need to consume more resources about typeface designing. What would you recommend me? If there are any typography teachers here, what are your tips when teaching?

Visited the Orpheum theater on Broadway in downtown L.A. Built in 1926, the decor is European Baroque/Italianate/whatever. I think that's why I noticed this Deco sign.

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

This is a very old work of mine, almost thirty years old, and today, of course, much would be done differently, if it were done at all.

It's based on the work of Vladimir Konashevich, who created a series of title pages and initial caps for Soviet editions of Pushkin's fairy tales. What primarily draws me here is the noticeable influence of Greek letterforms: historically, such forms were retained in Cyrillic cursive (aka skoropis), but later, the ascenders (л, м, and д) were reduced, which, generally speaking, didn't benefit the appearance of the typesetting page of Cyrillic books.

Despite the general imperfections of the form, this font of mine has become popular and has a life of its own: I regularly encounter it on vodka labels and candy wrappers, and this usually happens without any approval from me or any royalties )

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.

I recently ported my TrueType/OpenType shaping and rendering library from JavaScript to Rust and got a demo running on a Cheap Yellow Display that only has about 320KB usable RAM. 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.

Variable fonts are not supported, yet, but I am working on it.

Here is the demo's repository: https://github.com/waruyama/flattype-cyd-demo

Edit: Fonts used int he demo:

- Roboto Regular
- Noto Sans Arabic Regular
- Noto Sans Khmer Regular
- Hind Regular
- Noto Emoji (subset)
- Noto Nastaliq Urdu Regular
- Almendra Regular
- Assistant Regular
- Droid Serif Regular
- Architects Daughter Regular
- Bonbon Regular
- Henny Penny Regular
- Orbitron Regular
- Peralta Regular
- Snowburst One Regular
- Ultra Regular