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, with a few altered glyphs. 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.
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 (B, D, F, H, I, J,
K, L, P, Q, R, T, and U). On the whole, it was a clever design
concept: each of the glyphs he chose tended to fill the
rectangular space more evenly. But the beauty of the public domain
is that you can take someone's project and use it for something
totally unrelated that more closely suits your vision... and my
vision aims for a more conventional caps look. Perusing Droid's
Private Use Area, Larabie appears to have already anticipated such
a decision: uppercase A and E were there, as were lowercase forms
for r, i and t if such forms better suited the project. My goal
was to rework this font so that it could be used as a
plug-it-in-and-go font that didn't require special characters to
achieve the desired appearance.
Droid also had a Cyrillic character set, which came in particular
handy for M. In Cyrillic alphabets, the letter forms M and m do
NOT represent the same letter. Ergo, Larabie had to include a
traditional capital M letterform in order to represent the
Cyrillic script faithfully. So I was already halfway there: copy
the private use glyphs for A and E, and the Cyrillic M, and put
those in their proper code points. I could do this simply by
converting the file to SVG using an online converter, going into
the source code, and copying the paths from one character code
point to the other.
That left three letters. Larabie didn't leave capital glyphs for
G, N or Y. When I first compiled the early versions of Thropoid, I
originally decided only to use glyphs that were present in the
font, as they were, without altering any of them, since, as I
mentioned, I was editing these things in raw SVG code and had no
WYSIWYG editing capabilities to see the end results as I was
going. So Y ended up being the yen sign, ¥. G, I ended up just
leaving alone since there wasn't any particularly appealing glyph
in the font I could repurpose (the closest was Ukrainian Є, but it
just wasn't quite. N had a simple, common enough shape—especially
with the boxy form of the typeface itself—that I went through
several substitutes: the pi symbol (too short), the n-ary product
symbol (too large), Cyrillic letter И (looked awkward) and finally
settling on another Cyrillic letter, П. Thus was born the original
version of Thropoid: the end result still ended up being kind of
quirky.
Then I decided just to make things easy on myself and download a proper, open-source font editor.
I'll say this much: there are a few things that simply editing the
raw code points is still easier and more reliable. But simple
tasks like removing a diacritical mark or flipping a glyph form
upside down or backward are SO much easier with far less (manually
calculated) math. So I went in, trimmed off the strikethrough
strokes on the yen sign to make a proper Y, then flipped the И
glyph to make a proper N. For G, there were two potential ways to
address it: adjust a few points on Є, or a vertical flip of the
lowercase e. Both would've likely ended up looking the same but I
ended up choosing the Є.
…and voilà! Thus was created the current, clean,
perfectly respectable version of Thropoid you see on the
Fullervision Web site.
All of the glyph forms I replaced are in Thropoid's private use
area (except g, which you would have to get from the original
Droid font because I forgot to preserve it). Perhaps I will make a
separate font with those, though I don't think I would like the
results as much. While I was in the font editor, I took a little
extra time to, by way of copying and flipping some glyphs, create
a near-complete coverage of the capital Greek alphabet that wasn't
present in the original Droid. One caveat, though, is that I had
to take out a large chunk of the accented A and E glyphs for
consistency because they all relied on the lowercase forms that
came with the original font. Foreign languages aren't really my
priority (the Greek was mainly for symbols) so I'm just going to
leave it "as is."
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.