3. That time I tried to design a font, but ended up with 26 circles instead

I’m a messy person. My room is never tidy. I have no idea what my desktop wallpaper looks like, because it’s always covered with piles of files. If you ever try to prank me by replacing my wallpaper, it won’t work. Because I’ll never see it.

Yet, when it comes to design I’m eerily tidy in my mind. I always have sets of rules that I cannot stand to break. It’s like a weird case of OCD where I have to keep everything consistent. Very often that works out great, giving birth to stuff like this:

Rule 1. Use very limited color palette. Rule 2. Create every object using only a rounded wavy pattern. Rule 3. Direct everything at 30 degrees

Imagine if I also included triangles, and a few more colors, and the direction of the objects was random. It wouldn’t have been that impactful and simple. It would’ve been messy and chaotic. So, for illustration and most other things, blindly striving for consistency gives great results. It brings order to chaos.

So this one time I set my mind on creating a geometric font that would be based on circular shapes. Halfway through, the rule “based on circular shapes” turned into “is circular shapes”. I over-minimalized the shit out of that font.

I quickly realized that in typography, consistency is nearly impossible. You gotta make an occasional exception here or there. Each letter is its own story, with its own geometry and proportions. Some letters don’t even make sense! I mean, small “L” and big “I” is essentially the same line. Small “r” looks totally unfinished. And the line at the bottom of big “Q” was probably a mistake by an intern, but they went with it anyway.

Having a circle in every letter didn’t work out as well as I planned. What makes sense for one letter, doesn’t make sense for another. And I was going crazy here, so for the sake of my sanity I had to forever stop trying to design fonts. Another reason being that I doubt people would find a font like this useful: