Fullervision Enterprises is introducing a new headline typeface. Meet Thropoid—a tall, condensed display type.
Sit down, this'll take a while.
Technically, I didn't design it. It is simply a re-coded version of Droid, a font originally designed by Ray Larabie. Droid was one of Larabie's first free typefaces back in the 1990s and, like much of his other work from that era, he deeded it into the public domain in 2024. Larabie's public domain archive contains hundreds of fonts; it's a veritable treasure trove of typography that I've been playing in ever since he put the first batch of fonts into the public domain in 2020. Droid was one that caught my eye—there aren't a lot of very narrow fonts like it that have no copyright, but I decided to do some rearranging to make the font fit my purposes.
The original Droid was a unicase font—it did not have different glyphs for lowercase and uppercase, but the glyphs for each of the 26 letters were a mix of uppercase and lowercase. Of those 26, 7 letters—C, O, S, V, W, X, and Z—had the same glyph anyway. But for the other 19… Larabie chose to use lowercase glyphs for A, E, G, M, N, and Y, but uppercase glyphs for the rest. Since he's the artist, he had a reason for that but I was looking for something a little more mainstream. Fortunately, he included alternate capital glyphs for A and E in the font's Private Use Area, and for M, he included the traditional capital M in the font's Cyrillic section (as it turns out, a lowercase m shaped glyph in a Cyrillic alphabet will be interpreted as cursive T, which in non-cursive type has the same glyph as a Latin T, so he had to use a traditional M glyph, also the same in Latin and Cyrillic when not in cursive, for the Cyrillic M).
So, I went onto a font converter, converted the file to SVG (the most human-readable source code I could get), and rearranged the glyphs so that capital A, E and M are in their place, before converting back to a font file. The end result, since A and E are two of the three most common glyphs in the English (and most other Latin-based) languages, is a font that looks much more mainstream. Larabie didn't leave capital glyphs for G, N or Y; I supposed I could have taken another Cyrillic letter and flipped it with some transformation math to get the N, or done a similar thing cutting off legs from other glyphs to get a passable capital Y, but I decided instead to leave the few tall lowercases in for character.
I know, I know. Only a nerd would put this much explanation into the process.
Well, since Droid is short for "android," I decided to name it as a play on that. Andro- and anthropo- both come from the same root word. So, by SAT-style analogy, if you can call an android an anthropoid and it mean roughly the same thing, a droid would also be a thropoid. Right?
I'm still working on that. Right now the only place Thropoid is is in the font folder on my site server, and on my personal hard drive.
Eventually, Thropoid will be dedicated in the public domain with a CC0 license, just as Larabie's original Droid is, once I establish a way to distribute it without causing a run on my server.