Myrna; Tongari Display; Avería

America celebrates those who have served, today, and I’ll take this moment up front to thank any of y’all who have or do serve! 🙏🇺🇸

I’m trying to take it easy today, since we do have the day off at work, hence the later-than-usual Tuesday Drop.

---

TL;DR

(This is an LLM/GPT-generated summary of today’s Drop. This week, I continue to play with Ollama’s “cloud” models for fun and for $WORK (free tier, so far), and gave gpt-oss:120b-cloud a go with the Zed task. Even with shunting context to the cloud and back, the response was almost instantaneous. They claim not to keep logs, context, or answers, but I need to dig into that a bit more.)

• Myrna is a programming font that gives symbols equal visual weight to letters, enhancing readability for code with multi‑character operators (https://github.com/sayyadirfanali/Myna)
• Tongari Display is a typeface inspired by Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, offering seven weights that evoke samurai swords (https://aisforfonts.com/tongari)
• Avería is a computationally generated typeface created by averaging the outlines of all fonts on the creator’s computer, forming a unique yet familiar family (http://iotic.com/averia/)

---

Myrna

Myna is a new programming font built with a simple but refreshing idea: symbols matter just as much as letters. While most fonts treat punctuation and operators as an afterthought, Myna gives them equal attention, recognizing that modern programming languages are packed with symbols like ->, ::, and $. Instead of relying on ligatures, Myna aligns multi-character operators so they naturally read as unified shapes, maintaining a clean ASCII purity without losing visual rhythm. The result is a font that feels intentional in every line of code.

Its design also focuses on reducing visual confusion. That means no more squinting to tell 1 from l (one) or 0 (zero) from O (letter “O”). Symbols have the right visual weight to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with letters, and there’s special attention paid to the quirks of languages like Perl, Haskell, and C. Yes, the first example on the site is a syntax-highlghted Perl snippet. O_o. Myna takes cues from respected predecessors like Fira Mono and Inconsolata but evolves beyond them with a minimalist, geometric touch. It is, of course, distributed under the SIL Open Font License, so anyone can use and adapt it freely.

The name, Myna, nods to the Gracula religiosa bird, and the section header is a screencap of this section rendered with Myna.

---

Tongari Display

Today, on Mastodon, I noted the passing of Tatsuya Nakadai (92yo) a brilliant actor who [co]starred in some of my all time favorite films. I say that without prepending “Japanese”, though a large chunk of my favs are Japanese films.

He often worked with one of the most amazing and talented film makers of all time: Akira Kurosawa. Even if you have never seen one of Kurosawa’s films, you have almost certainly seen many that were inspired by one or more of them.

One iconic film from Kurosawa’s repertroire is Seven Samurai. If you have never seen it, put this Drop away and go find away to watch it now. Yes: now.

Since I can now assume everyone saw the film, we can (briefly) talk about Tongari Display, a typeface by Émilie Rigaud that was directly inspired by Seven Samurai, featuring seven weights (light to black) representing each of the seven samurai, with letterforms designed to evoke the razor-edged blades of samurai swords.

Angela Riechers has a super-short post that talks about both the Text and Display versions, along with how the movie helped inspired the design. All I learned about the fonts came from her, so you should 100% give it a read.

The section header was set in the font.

---

Avería

Avería is a typeface created through an unusual experiment in computational typography. Rather than being designed by hand, it emerged from averaging together all the fonts on creator’s computer. The process involved breaking down each letterform into hundreds of equally-spaced points along their perimeters, then averaging the positions of corresponding points across all fonts. This mathematical approach produced a typeface that represents the collective characteristics of hundreds of different font designs, creating something that feels familiar yet entirely new.

The project started with a simple curiosity about what generative typography might look like. Early experiments overlaying letters at low opacity produced blurry results that showed interesting patterns, particularly revealing how certain letters like the lowercase ‘g’ exist in two distinct common forms across different typefaces. The challenge became finding a way to preserve the sharp, well-defined edges of traditional fonts while still capturing the average of their forms. After exploring various morphing and interpolation techniques, the solution turned out to be elegantly simple: sample each letter’s outline at many points and average those positions across all fonts.

The name Avería comes from Spanish, where it means mechanical breakdown or damage, which seemed curiously appropriate for a font created by decomposing and reconstructing hundreds of existing typefaces. The project resulted in a complete font family including Regular, Bold, Light, and Italic variants, each generated from corresponding subsets of the source fonts.

The section header is this section set in Avería, and the word that constantly comes to mind as I’ve been previewing it while making final edits in the WordPress editor is: “haunting”.

---

FIN

Remember, you can follow and interact with the full text of The Daily Drop’s free posts on:

• 🐘 Mastodon via @dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev@dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev
• 🦋 Bluesky via https://bsky.app/profile/dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev.web.brid.gy

☮️