hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

Drop #714 (2025-10-07): Typography Tuesday

hrbrmstr

Featured Free Font: Retrocide; Impeccably Irreverent and Instructional ABCs; RoboFont

Today we rectify a multi-year failure in these typography editions of the Drop and link to a unique monospaced font and fun learning resource.

TL;DR

(This is an LLM/GPT-generated summary of today’s Drop using Qwen/Qwen3-8B-MLX-8bit with /no_think via MLX, a custom prompt, and a Zed custom task.)

Retrocide Mono (GH) is a monospaced display font built for the “retro-futurist” crowd. It takes the classic grid-based rigidity of a terminal font and pushes it into something deliberately artificial. If I was pressed to succinctly describe it, I’d have to go with “tight”, “angular”, and “neatly compressed”. The defining quirk is that it has no descenders. Letters that usually dip below the baseline, like g, p, q, and y, are cut off and reworked so every glyph sits squarely inside the same vertical box. The result is a perfectly flat baseline where every character feels locked into place, almost as if it’s printed on a dot matrix or displayed on an old CRT monitor that’s allergic to vertical overflow.

That design choice makes it ideal for certain uses: code snippets, terminal UIs, synthwave aesthetics, and anywhere you want your text to look mechanical and precise. Because no glyphs extend below the line, you can stack text with almost no vertical padding and get a grid that feels clean and controlled. It’s a great fit for retro-styled interfaces or visual projects that lean on rhythm and repetition. But it’s also a tradeoff, as those missing descenders break some of the familiar shapes readers expect. Words with g or y can look a little odd, which makes it less suited for long paragraphs or everyday text.

Retrocide Mono isn’t trying to be a neutral programming font like JetBrains Mono or Fira Code. It’s more of a artsy statement piece. It’s a font designed to remind you that text can be an aesthetic choice, not just a vessel for information.

However, it also will not be on my system much longer than the extent of crafting this Drop, since the lack of descenders is really messing with me.

Impeccably Irreverent and Instructional ABCs

James Edmondson is a type designer and the founder of OH no Type Company, an independent digital type foundry. He’s based in Oakland, California (though the foundry itself is based in San Jose), and started OH no in 2015. He studied graphic design at California College of the Arts and graduated from the Royal Academy of Art’s TypeMedia program in the Netherlands. In 2018, he co-founded Future Fonts, a platform for distributing fonts in-progress.

His typefaces are known for their distinctive, lively character, and his portfolio features an eclectic mix of psychedelic swirls, liquid curves, and inventive interpretations of everyday styles. OH no Type Co. creates both retail and custom typefaces for clients ranging from startups to major brands.

But we’re not here to talk about James’ fonts, per se.

On the OH no site, you’ll find a “teaching” section (dubbed the “OH no Type School”) where James provides a plethora of detailed information on the design process for individual glyphs of the Roman alpbabet.

He uses a horizontal scrollytelling model to cover unique aspects of each glyph with a decidedly fun and irreverant tone. Most of us do not design/craft fonts, so this very accessible peek behind the curtain sheds quite a bit of light on many concepts we likely would never think of. For example, here’s a Postlight Reader version of the “O” section:

TIL “O” is a “foundational” glyph! (which makes perfect sense, but I would have likely started with a “A” if I were to start designing a font without formal training).

You can get through all the glyphs pretty quickly, but I find poring over each one has helped keep the info in reference memory, which adds a new “Karnak Mander-Azur” dimension when hitting up a new web resource that uses a font I haven’t encountered before.

RoboFont

While doing research for today’s fontastic Drop, the RoboFont editor kept being referenced. To my surprise, when I did a rg -itmd "robofont" in the Drop’s top-level directory, I discovered we’ve never talked about it before, and am making up for that mistake, today.

This tool is a macOS-only (it plays nice with Tahoe) font editor built entirely in Python and is designed for type designers who want full control over every detail of their workflow. It doesn’t do anything automagically behind-the-scenes. Instead, it expects us to know what we’re doing and gives us precise tools to make that happen. Think of it as the developer’s font editor: transparent, scriptable, and endlessly customizable.

Its foundation is the UFO3 (Unified Font Object) format (we covered this back in 2023), an open XML-based standard that plays well with version control. Because RoboFont is written in Python 3.12, we can script nearly everything from repetitive drawing tasks to batch exporting, which makes it ideal for folks who live by automation.

The core tools include the Font Overview, Glyph Editor, Groups Editor, Smart Sets, Space Center, and Kern Center, all of which let us work closely with a typeface’s structure, metrics, and relationships.

It’s also highly extensibile, and was designed and built as a platform for creating new/custom tools. Through Mechanic, RoboFont’s package manager, we can install dozens of open-source and commercial extensions for interpolation previews, variable font workflows, batch generation, or specialized designspace editing.

RoboFont also supports variable font creation using designspace files, allowing multiple sources along different axes and handling glyph substitution rules. Folks in EDU can request free student trial licenses or subscribe to the Student License Service, making it accessible for teaching and learning environments.

I opened up a font we’ll talk about next week in the tool and took a cue from the middle section to showcase the “O” in one RoboFont editor view for the section header.

FIN

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