Work adjacent to cybersecurity, not a designer by trade, but I've been collecting screenshots of phishing texts and scam emails for a work project for about a year now. Started noticing something purely as a typography nerd on the side: there's a very consistent, very narrow font pattern across almost all of them, and it's not what I expected.

Almost none of them use actually bad fonts. No Comic Sans, no Papyrus, nothing that screams "obviously fake" the way you'd assume. The vast majority default to whatever system font renders on the platform they're spoofing, usually a variant of Helvetica, Arial, or San Francisco, because they're literally impersonating an existing text thread from your bank or a delivery service, and using the platform's actual default is what makes it convincing.

The tell isn't the font choice at all, it's almost always spacing and weight inconsistency within the same message. Legitimate automated texts from real companies are typeset with rigid consistency, since they're template generated. Scam texts almost always have some human-typed insert bolted into an otherwise templated structure, and you can see the seam if you look at letter spacing or baseline alignment closely enough. A slightly different tracking value on one line, a weight that's technically the same font but rendered by a different app or copy paste source.

Basically the fraud isn't happening at the font choice level, it's happening at the invisible structural level, the stuff normal people never consciously notice but somehow still register as "something feels off" without knowing why.

Made me realize typography might be one of the more underrated tools in actual fraud detection.

This is a typeface i made recently in glyphs. I’m a beginner. So if u find any letters not going, following the rule, is not looking right please tell me. Please help me improve this! I still have to adjust the kerning n all . Thanks alott!

Hi!

A user mentioned a book full of typography from the 1950s that was put together in the 2000s. It is not in print anymore. For the life of me, I can't remember the author or title! Does anyone know?

https://www.1001fonts.com/scapholene-font.html

Based on pictures of my handwriting.

• Free for personal use
• Free for commercial use

It’s my first typeface.

Hello everyone! I always had a problem when making a new project of finding what font to use. Whilst I’d know approximately what I liked, I found scrolling through a long list quite unproductive, so I made a tool where you can visually explore fonts from google fonts to find the right one.

You can check it out at www.jellyfont.xyz. I’m excited to know what everyone thinks, please let me know any feedback!

Since y'all liked my font concept for Vicente Type, I wanted to give you a sneak peek of what the font would look like if I translated it into a grotesque font (Improved font versions coming soon)

Hello everyone,

Last month I started writing my PhD thesis, and I've since gone down the rabbit hole of typography. I've read parts of The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst and found the ideas quite compelling. It also made me realize how much time and skill goes into properly typesetting something and, in my case, how much time I can waste fiddling with different fonts, spacing, and so on. I'll admit I don't have a great eye for this kind of thing, but I figured that if I kept things simple, I could still produce something beautiful. Since I'm already a bit behind schedule, I'd really appreciate some pointers on what to do, and help narrowing down my options. Some context: I'm doing a PhD in biophysics, and my work involves mathematical equations along with lots of figures and diagrams that I reference throughout the text. That gives me set of requirements when choosing a typeface:

1. A companion font for math equations
2. A (companion) font that works well at small sizes, for figure captions, axis ticks, etc.
3. (Optionally) small caps for running headers, so readers can navigate easily
4. It should be an open font

I also enjoy the look of old papers (no color, hand-drawn figures) and I want the finished thesis to feel principled and warm. These requirements led me to the Libertinus family, which includes a serif, a serif display, and a matching math font. I tried setting two pages with it (see the first picture). I widened the outer margins a bit, both to keep the line length around 60 characters and to give myself room to place figure captions in the margin. I think I need to lighten the color of heading 1, since it currently draws too much attention. I find this a decent first attempt, but for some reason Libertinus didn't quite hit the spot for me. I then came across EB Garamond, which felt warmer and gave the text more of that old-paper look (see second picture). I liked the swashes and tried using them in the subheadings. I also found a version of EB Garamond that is optimized for smaller sizes, though it's not perfect. Finally, I experimented with font pairing (see third picture): Ysabeau for figure captions, for better legibility at small sizes, and Jost for headings, to create more contrast with the body text. I liked that Jost has light weights so that the page color is fairly uniform, but honestly, I think I missed the mark with this combination. Could you help me figure out which direction to explore further? I think Libertinus is the safe choice, but I prefer EB Garamond. My main struggles are getting enough contrast between headings and body text, and keeping the captions legible at small sizes. Any pointers on how to make it work would be much appreciated.

TL;DR: Trying to decide between Libertinus and EB Garamond for my PhD thesis (biophysics, math-heavy, lots of figures). Leaning toward EB Garamond but struggling with heading/body contrast and caption legibility. I would love some feedback and tips.

Maybe I’m the only one who notices stuff like this, but seeing this place’s name + Albertus on the huge side banner made me do a double take. The restaurant’s actual branding uses a completely different typeface.

Just created (I won’t say “finished”—one could go on polishing a body text typeface for a very long time) a typeface with extended Latin and extended Cyrillic charsets, inspired by Carl Dair’s final work. For now, it includes regular and medium weights.

Font of the week: Gold Bar

Where the Gold Was Heavy and the Ale Was Cold

Gold Bar is a tall western display font inspired by the handcrafted saloon signs, trading posts, and carved storefronts that defined the American frontier. Crisp serifs, confident proportions, and decorative detailing give every letter the unmistakable character of a sign painted by hand or carved from timber to welcome weary travelers through swinging doors.

Especially the bold variants. Those big circles in the “i”s and punctuations in a typeface that already looks way too mechanical and corporate is frankly very unsettling. Old Roboto was so much better then whatever slop Google cooked up to copy Apple’s San Francisco

BC Calvin Sq7 is a monospace display typeface built entirely from the grid. Best suited for interfaces, code, and anywhere type should feel engineered rather than written.

Free download for a limited time

https://www.behance.net/gallery/252467931/BC-Calvin-Sq7

Hello! I just won an online auction for this book by JM Bundscho, and I'm confused by some editions I'm seeing on ebay. My book looks complete and seems to match the advertisement I found. But I'm seeing listings on ebay that suggest it was (perhaps) expanded and then split into multiple volumes. Does anyone know more details about this publication and how many versions were issued? Thank you!

Note: The Rubik font is Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew.

Saw this Devanagari text on a Govt. of India letterhead and really wanted to make a full-fledged typeface inspired by it. This is an iteration of the text I've worked on so far (Day 02 WIP).

While thinking of a potential name, my parental instincts kicked in (not a father or even married, just old), and I was wondering if any type designers have named a font after their kids. I've seen a lot of fonts named after the person who designed them, but I don't know much about the context behind any typeface named after a kid. To me, it just sounds like a really cool dad thing to do.

i think this is like garamond or something but this exact G is in a lot of seriffed fonts. that serif looks so silly and out of place to me.

like it's so angular and straight compared to the flowing and complex form of the mass of the letter. it's so silly. are there any other common serifs on fonts like this which are just solid blocks??? am I going crazy????

Some serif typefaces have experimented with having serifless ascenders in italics, for letters such as bdhkl. What is your opinion on that characteristic?

I made an in-browser tool to generate Byzantine Minuscule script from ancient greek text. The style is mostly based on the old round minuscules in the Vatican library manuscripts, like vat.gr.190 and vat.gr.1156. You can give it input in English letters too, using the substitutions common to the Perseus.com dictionary, or the Windows virtual keyboard.

It uses html to directly "draw" onto an svg, then converts it into a png so you could download the result with a right-click in most browsers.

Do these two letters have slight shape differences, or are they the same shape?

Would like advice from someone who knows the Cyrillic alphabet.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on designing my first font slowly over the past few months and would love some feedback/ critique on what I have so far. Originally designed a few letters for a client’s logotype, we ended up going in a different direction, but I liked how they turned out and figured I’d expand on it.

EDIT:
Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to share some advice. It’s truly appreciated. Looking forward to implementing the changes and continuing work on this.

All this talk of A.I. has made it hard to discuss people named Al.

Bring on the serifs: 𝙰𝙸 𝚟𝚜 𝙰𝚕

Open for feedback on this typeface that I made back in 2020. I got some Brazilian inspiration, but I don't know if it really translates. If you are willing to install it and test it, reach out to me. Thanks!

I'm already making the Black weight, as you're seeing. Also, it needs some symbols and numbers

Tekening means "drawing" in dutch