Lilex & Zed; D.I.Y. ’75 ; Font Design Game

I thought working on this “it’s been a while” Typography Tuesday Drop would help me get back to slumber (narrator: it did not), but it at least accomplished getting the first intra-week Drop edition out the door.

Keen-eyed readers will note the use of ibm/granite4.1:8b (HF). It is ridiculously good at text-ops.

These are the stats from this Drop’s TL;DR generation using it (on my daily driver — an aged M1 MacBook Pro Max):

total duration:       10.069300417s
load duration:        54.63ms
prompt eval count:    1529 token(s)
prompt eval duration: 4.340250958s
prompt eval rate:     352.28 tokens/s
eval count:           196 token(s)
eval duration:        5.614041754s
eval rate:            34.91 tokens/s

I had the privilege of getting to run it on an M5 MacBook Pro Max as well:

total duration:       3.953028292s
load duration:        39.902208ms
prompt eval count:    1529 token(s)
prompt eval duration: 1.90916525s
prompt eval rate:     800.87 tokens/s
eval count:           170 token(s)
eval duration:        1.964410791s
eval rate:            86.54 tokens/s

macOS folks: stop giving Foundation Model providers your data!

TL;DR

(This is an LLM/GPT-generated summary of today’s Drop. Ollama and ibm/granite4.1:8b.)

• Lilex & Zed: Lilex is a ligature-enhanced, PowerLine-enabled monospaced font derived from IBM Plex Sans by Mikhael Khrustik, and it is the default font in Zed editor (https://lilex.myrt.co/) (GitHub).
• D.I.Y. ’75: D.I.Y. ’75 is a typewriter font reverse-engineered from scans of early-1970s fanzine material, offering a unique grime that cannot be replicated by standard distress filters (https://designbeep.com/2026/04/25/d-i-y-75-font/).
• Font Design Game: FontBob’s interactive game teaches type design through hands-on practice, guiding users to draw a full alphabet by hand and apply optical corrections for each letterform (https://fontbob.com/game).

Lilex & Zed

Lilex (GH) is a ligature-enhanced, PowerLine-enabled monospaced font created from the base of IBM Plex Sans by Mikhael Khrustik. I’m taking a break from Maple Mono (since I can’t seem to stick with one coding/terminal font for more than 6-9 months) and this hit my font radar. I did the usual digging I do when poking at new fonts and discovered a fun (yes my definition of that word is very odd) interrelationship between it and Zed Mono.

That (archived) zed-fonts repo initially described Zed Mono as custom-built from Iosevka, but Zed currently bundles IBM Plex Sans and Lilex as its defaults, and the aliases .ZedSans and .ZedMono resolve to those. Setting buffer_font_family to .ZedMono in your Zed settings gets you Lilex, not the Iosevka-derived typeface in the repo.

The lineage’s a bit…tangled. Zed Plex Mono was an earlier IBM Plex fork with ligatures manually bolted on. At some point the team switched to Lilex – which had already done the IBM Plex Mono extension work properly – and .ZedMono became an alias pointing at it (because ofc it is). The Iosevka-based Zed Mono and Zed Sans in zed-fonts appear to be a parallel effort: installable via brew install --cask font-zed-mono, but not what the editor actually ships.

So, if you haven’t touched Zed’s font settings, you’re already running Lilex — which is great! — but, if you also have Lilex installed system-wide, Zed will always default to the baked-in version (give that issue a 👍🏼 to get the Zed folks to care more about it).

D.I.Y. ’75

D.I.Y. ’75 showed up on DaFont on March 31, 2026, and the origin story is more interesting than the font itself (no shade there meant on the font — I included it in the Drop, so it’s a solid pick IMO).

Michael Tension of Tension Type was rebuilding pages for a vinyl album booklet. The client was an early-1970s band that had produced their own fanzine back in the day, and Tension was working from scans of original copies. Some pages were missing, so he did what you do: looked at what letterforms survived across the photocopied material and reconstructed the gaps himself. D.I.Y. ’75 is what fell out of that process.

That matters because most typewriter fonts are sampled from a known source – someone sits down with an Olivetti Lettera or a Hermes 3000 and digitizes the strikes directly. This one was reverse-engineered from the full degradation chain: typewriter strike to cheap paper to photocopy to paste-up misalignment to scan. Each step in that chain leaves a mark. You can’t fake that particular flavor of grime by starting from a clean source and adding a distress filter (we’ve all seen designers try, and it definitely doesn’t read the same way).

The “‘75” in the name is likely pointing at the approximate era of the source material – squarely in proto-punk fanzine territory, Sniffin’ Glue vintage, give or take a year. The specific band isn’t named anywhere I could find, which is either a client confidentiality thing or just an omission nobody bothered to correct.

The section header is the Lilex section source in Zed with D.I.Y. ’75.

Font Design Game

I played through FontBob’s Font Design Game, and found it to be a genuinely clever way to learn how type designers think.

FontBob itself is a web-based font editor, and the game mode walks folks through drawing a full alphabet by hand. You start with a single glyph outline and make adjustments to it — thinning joints, nudging nodes, doing the small optical fixes that separate a rough shape from something that actually looks right. The tool doesn’t explain why you’re making each change, which is a deliberate choice. You just draw, match the target shape, and build up muscle memory for how each letterform works.

The letter derivation system is pretty neat. After drawing various “key letters” or “master glyphs”, a whole set of related glyphs get unlocked/generated for free.

Each letter has its own character as a puzzle. Some are straightforward, like “V”, whichh is just four nodes snapped into place with minor center adjustments. Others are trick, and the “S” is particularly insidious: you draw a rough shape, then apply a series of small optical corrections until the curves feel balanced.

The whole sequence moves fast. Once you’ve drawn maybe ten or eleven base glyphs, you have a complete working alphabet. At the end you get a keyboard where you can type anything using the font you just made — either an on-screen glyph keyboard or your normal phone keyboard. You can publish it, download it, and share a link with anyone. (NOTE: I have not finished the game yet.)

FIN

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