CURVES

In January 2019 I was drawing logos out of geometric shapes and wanted to know whether I could carry one construction rule across a whole character set instead of a single word. I gave myself a narrow brief: one weight, one case, and letters built from the same parts.

One rule for every letter

Each glyph is assembled from flat stems and quarter turns drawn at a single radius. Where the rule leaves a gap, the gap stays. That is why the R breaks at the shoulder and the Q keeps an open corner instead of a tail. I drew the outlines in Illustrator and compiled the font with Fontself.

Unicase by design

The alphabet is unicase. Uppercase and lowercase both call the same drawing, so a headline holds one texture regardless of how it was typed. Whoever sets the type does not get to break the texture.

The numerals were the harder half. Digits carry more diagonal and more open counters than this alphabet wanted, so the 2 and the 7 use a diagonal the letters avoid, and the zero takes a slash to keep it apart from the O.

Punctuation, math signs, currency, and accented Latin bring the font to 96 glyphs, which is enough to set languages beyond English.

Release

I released CURVES in early 2019 on DaFont, free for personal and commercial use, and posted the specimen on Behance. As of August 2026 it has passed 23,000 downloads.

The rule that holds a headline together closes the counters too far at text sizes. It is a display face and it is used as one: 23,000 downloads, seven years on.