This month, we’re talking fonts. Well, mostly typefaces, and a little bit about letterforms, but for simplicity I’m just going to call them fonts (sorry, designers). I’ll tell you a bit about why font choice matters, and I’ll break down a few examples. Then, I’ll walk you through how I go about picking fonts for a project.
But first, updates from Foresight Studio:
The Cross Stitch made its way to Indie Press Revolution and Exalted Funeral mid-last month, and copies are still available! In this printing, a separate timetable is included, along with page references on the individual locations’ timelines.
Hillbrook Glen: Follow Your Bliss has been improving with every playtest, and I’m just streamlining it a bit before releasing it later this summer. I’ll have more to say about the editing process and the logic behind its mechanics then!
I have a zine for CY_BORG in the works entitled Ex Nihilo / Ad Nihilum, which you can expect to see more of later this summer. Expect cults, neo-hermeticism, reality-warping, and Scandi Minimalism.
Triangle Agency’s Kickstarter launched today!!! It was a privilege to work on a few layouts for the campaign, I’m thrilled to write a mission for it, and I’m just so glad it’s taking off. Please go back it.
I’m also so excited to be working on design & layout for the upcoming Silt Verses RPG, a game of folk horror and monstrous divinity from The Gauntlet & Glowing Roots Press. Although it won’t be out for a little bit, you can already see the game in action—or, listen to the podcast, which has a new season coming soon.
Not TTRPG, but I visited The House of Eternal Return yesterday, and it broke my brain a little bit. I’ll probably write more about what makes it so incredible at some point down the line, but in the meantime, if you live near a Meow Wolf location, I highly highly recommend a visit.
Okay, let’s talk fonts. I’ll go through it in 3 sections:
The Medium is the Message
Reading is complicated. Your eyes trace out a letterform, lingering on its edges and protrusions and variations in line weight, and they pass that information on to your brain. Your brain compares the form to the letters you’ve seen before and decodes it, placing it in the context of its neighbors for interpretation. And it happens so fast you barely have time to think about it.
Your brain does even more than that, though. You’ve read a lot of words in your life, and you’ve seen them in all sorts of contexts—the covers of books, the opening credits of TV shows, the signs in front of restaurants, a can of beans at the grocery store. You start to associate the ways these words are presented with their context, and these associations gradually build up over time. Because of your prior experience with certain fonts, when you see a something written in a chunky blackletter1, for example, your brain goes to the medieval. A slick sans serif might bring up a certain kind of trendy tech company. If you see something in Papyrus and it’s 1993, you’re thinking Ancient Egypt, but if it’s 2023, those associations may have been replaced with something more like this.
A phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan in the ‘60s, “the medium is the message,” neatly sums this up: the way a piece of media is presented carries information in and of itself, independent of its content. A font can align neatly with its content, or it can push it in an unexpected direction. Or, it can undermine the content entirely. Like, there’s a lot of reasons people on the internet are lampooning Lord of the Rings: Gollum, but the use of what resembles Calibri (the default font in many word-processors) certainly doesn’t help. A modern sans serif doesn’t scream “Middle-earth.”
In the same way a d20 roll-over system takes advantage of familiar mechanics, in the same way a fantasy setting sticks willowy elves in the woods and stout dwarves in the mountains, fonts can be a shortcut to bring the reader into your game’s world.
Trope L’Oeil
Tropes are everywhere. Every piece of media leans on our collective associations with particular archetypes, genres, and settings. But the most thought-provoking work re-interprets these tropes, disassembling and reconstructing them in unusual ways. Complete narratives—novels, movies, audio dramas—have a pretty easy time doing this, but TTRPGs place the story in the hands of the players. Because of the lack of a single script or canon in 99% of TTRPGs, the presentation becomes that much more important. Like 3D forced-perspective trickery, the right font (accompanied with well-considered graphic design) will make the reader’s brain fill in the spaces, bridge the narrative gaps with the power of *vibes*. And, perhaps, encourage them to poke at the tropes they invoke.
Let’s dig into some examples.
Deathmatch Island
Deathmatch Island, by Old Dog Games and published by Evil Hat, is all about using design to tell the story. It makes heavy use of the Swiss Style (also sometimes called the International Style), which was born in the 1920s & 30s from a mixture of new architectural technology and a rejection of the heavily ornamental trends of the late 1800s. In line with this, the only typeface used in Deathmatch Island is Neue Haas Grotesk (which later became Helvetica), the definitive typeface of the 1950s-60s iteration of the Swiss Style. This works for two main reasons. First, the International Style is ahistorical and impersonal2; so is the shadowy group behind the deadly games on Deathmatch Island. Second, modernist fonts like this one have been heavily used on the consumer-facing side of the tech industry. Using Neue Haas Grotesk invokes these tech companies, working as satire and planting seeds for the players when it comes to roleplay and theory crafting.3
Outliers, from Sam Leigh and Far Horizons Co-Op, takes a similar approach for similar reasons, and it works really well.
CY_BORG
When it comes to anything out of Stockholm Kartell & Ockult Örtmästare Games, font is essential.4 CY_BORG uses an enormous array of fonts, and each is selected to support its content. In the map above, the wealthy enclaves of The Hills are labeled in an airy, light sans serif, clean and luxurious next to G0, the gritty disaster site, or the cramped, utilitarian labels of the slums. The book contains only sparse information on each of the city’s corporations, but their logotypes (above on the right) carry enough personality for players to fill in the gaps: ACGS’s impersonal sans stands in contrast to Gravf/Mellberg/Tosk’s authoritative serif, Tulles & DeVerte’s looping script points to a trendy lifestyle brand with a “human touch,” while Fideistic Transformation’s futuristic face seeks to transcend the human. And framing all of this is a heavy blackletter (Chomsky), letting you know that things are gonna get medieval.
Thirsty Sword Lesbians
The splashiest font choice in Thirsty Sword Lesbians (from Gay Spaceship Games & Evil Hat) is the lively, dynamic script on its cover and used for all its headings. The cover is handwritten, and throughout the text and playbooks, you’ll find Summer Lovin Solid. Thirsty Sword Lesbians encourages bold decision-making, mold-breaking roleplay, and features battles against restrictive norms at the heart of many of its scenarios. An organic, aggressive font supports the vibe of breaking free from the regular, while alluding to the over-the-top style of comics and adjacent media.
Creation Myths
Creation Myths is a new solo game of character creation from gothHoblin, and it’s beautiful. The font that gives it so much, well, character is Migueto, a swooping serif typeface with ornaments and ligatures. It has an ethereal, otherworldly look, a style that taps into current trends in meditation journals, affirmation booklets, tarot decks, and new-age texts. For a game of journaling and exploration of the self, I think it’s a perfect fit, and brings the player into a headspace that couldn’t be achieved were a different font used.
Every game with words uses a font. Though they may not seem like an essential part of play, I hope I’ve convinced you that they have the power to change your experience of a game—or any piece of media, for that matter.
If you’re not convinced, or you are convinced but you want to read more, check out:
Just My Type, Simon Garfield
Thinking with Type, Ellen Lupton
Serving (Type)face
So, how to pick a font? This is my process, and although it’s not exactly the same, it’s very similar to what Johan Nohr described in this fantastic twitter thread (which also covers some of what I said about fonts above). I think of it in 5 steps:
Research. Look at examples of the kind of vibe you hope to achieve, and see what they use. (For Hillbrook Glen, I spent a few days looking up luxury wellness retreats and collecting examples of their branding materials.)
Collect. Put together a list of every font you think might work for your project, and stick them side-by-side in the layout program of your choice. Make sure you have some flashier ones for headings, and some more “boring,” highly legible ones for body text.
Prune. Eliminate fonts that aren’t legible, ones where you have a similar, but better option, or ones that are too strongly associated with tropes you want to avoid (for example, I personally don’t want space opera/Star-Wars-y fonts showing up in my CY_BORG work). Then, see which of the remaining ones have more options: more ligatures, glyphs, italics, weights, etc.
Pair. Now that you have a smaller set of fonts to choose from, you can see which look good together. At this point I think more specifically about how they vibe with the content. Some fonts may represent certain in-fiction factions, some might highlight specific mechanics; some can be for player-facing content while others can be for the GM.
Print. You definitely want to type up little blocks of text with the font pairings you’ve picked, then print them out at a few different sizes to check for legibility. Or, you can take it a step further and put them in actual layouts. How well a font performs when printed may change based on how you position your text, what kind of backgrounds or textures you use, and so on.
And that’s it! At the end of the process, I have a set of fonts to pull from as I work through layout. Is it the most efficient method? Probably not, but as I continue to build out my font library, and as I keep gaining experience as a designer, I’ll eventually be able to pluck exactly the font I need for a given job.
In sum, font matters. A lot. If you have favorite examples of games that use fonts in excellent and/or unexpected ways, let me know! As always, I’m on twitter or mastodon, or you can come hang on the Foresight Studio discord server.
Looking to the future,
Ben // Foresight Studio
If you’re not familiar, blackletter fonts are styled after calligraphic scripts & early printed work from 1200-1700s Western Europe. They’re now commonly found in places like the titles of newspapers (The New York Times, Sydney Morning Herald, and Irish Examiner all use it).
Le Corbusier, architect and pioneer of the International Style, is quoted: “A house is a machine for living in.” Deathmatch Island is also presented as a machine… but one for dying in.
Theory crafting is a unique mechanic in Deathmatch Island that lets the competitor players influence what flavor of entity is actually behind the games, and in retrospect it would’ve made sense to discuss in last month’s newsletter about mechanics that use belief. Oops.
I’m highlighting CY_BORG here, but I’d recommend looking at the original text of MÖRK BORG side-by-side with the free barebones edition to see just how much is communicated through font choice. This is Johan Nohr’s jam.