Hel: A 3-Axis, Obliterated Variable Font
The web is not short of shonky, broken looking sans-serifs—some even by design.
But lo-fi shouldn’t mean lo-quality. I want my bands to sound nasty, gritty, shambolic, even unbalanced, but in just the right way. There needs to be deliberation in the destruction. Otherwise they’re just plain… bad.
It’s with this in mind that I set about creating the ultimate degraded sans-serif: Hel. I happen to be in Iceland right now, and Hel is norse for the underworld. Hel is a three-axis (count ‘em!) variable font, giving you fine-grained control over the letterforms’ distortion.
In its default form, it looks like an over-inked Xerox copy, printed on slightly mangled paper. The Slant (‘slnt’) axis tilts the forms somewhat artificially and can be used for faux italics.
(Note: This demos on this page use subsetted versions of the font. Here is the full version.)
The Warp (‘WARP’) axis is more interesting. Each character has been mangled, by hand, into absurd contortions.
Animating between discrete points on this axis can achieve a squigglevision-like effect.
I’ve attempted similar animation in SVG noise filters with CSS in the past, but that is pretty terrible for performance. Animating font-variation-settings is much less intensive.
The Shrink (‘shrk’) axis, as the name suggests, shrinks selected forms down. It also lifts them, breaking up the baseline. Applied lightly, it can add a subliminal level of instability/wonkiness. Aggressive application, especially when combined with the Warp axis, creates what I perceive as a kind of anxious intensity.
Features
Hel covers letters, numbers, symbols, and punctuation. It also includes a number of contextual alternates for paired letters.
sub E E' by E.alt;
sub O O' by O.alt;
sub S S' by S.alt;
sub L L' by L.alt;
sub T T' by T.alt;
sub R R' by R.alt;
sub F F' by F.alt;
sub P P' by P.alt;
sub M M' by M.alt;
sub N N' by N.alt;
sub D D' by D.alt;
sub C C' by C.alt;
sub B B' by B.alt;
sub G G' by G.alt;
sub Z Z' by Z.alt;
Hel is a font for disseminating anti-statist handbills and designing dirty, DIY web pages. The End User License Agreement (EULA) prevents you from using the font in a racist, homophobic, sexist or in general discriminating and hateful context. If you break the agreement, you will not receive a refund.
Summary
- Fonts
- 1
- Glyphs
- 80
- Variable axes
- 3 (Slant, Warp, Shrink)
- Contextual alternates
- 15
- Formats
- TTF, WOFF2
- License
- Web + Desktop
