42. Typesetting the Zone
+ showing off the work
Hello! This month I was busy looking for a job (already had an interview, yay!), welcoming my fiancée back in France and surviving the heatwave. I ran a couple of games with friends (namely DURF and Cloud Empress), and had a long evening of playing Magic with more friends. Hell yeah for games!
Fresh off the grid
Looking and applying for jobs is very time-consuming, so this month I mainly focused on the layout for “100 Dead Heroes”, Rookie Jet Studio’s TTRPG inspired by the comics and TV show The Boys.
“100 Dead Heroes” by Rookie Jet Studio
The goal for this one was to make it look like an old file pieced together with redacted documents and confidential reports. To achieve this sort of archival design I gave each page a frame where text and documents would be fitted, as if someone had been given empty sheets to fill with information from a variety of sources and formats. This also gave me more freedom to experiment and build variety out of a corporate black and white style that can feel stale very quickly.
This is all work in progress so I know I need to fix a few things here and there. But in the meantime don’t forget to follow the campaign if you want to see more of the book!
“Party at the Roche Limit” by TerryHerc
Ok so this one was released in April but I can’t resist showing off the illustrations I made for it. Drawing is not my strong suit but I think I managed to pull off the right vibe for the cover and map of this Atomic Age-inspired adventure for Mothership. It’s available here!
What’s your type(face)?
Maybe telling you that I’m a big fan of “zonecore” influenced the voting, but it worked out for me so who am I to complain! For those unaware, zonecore refers to fiction about an area where strange phenomena occur. These stories often follow explorers of these areas, who end up changed by the weirdness inside, whether on a physical or mental level. Think Roadside Picnic (film), Stalker (film and video games), The Southern Reach trilogy and the film it inspired, Annihilation. To sum up, zonecore is about exploring a familiar yet strange landscape and how it changes us. So let’s see how to convey this through typefaces!
Xenowort: what better way to represent change and mutation of the self than with a type where each character combines its lower and upper case?1
Lem Fonts: this collection of fonts is inspired by the works of Stanisław Lem (author of the novel Solaris). Most of them are variable and contort into strange organic shapes, just like the stalkers in the Zone. The one shown here is Mimoid.
You Dense: in this second collection, each typeface is based on the density of a material, with each type having different weight representing different ways to interpret this density. This leads to a variety of experimental and distorted characters, a perfect illustration of the Zone’s twisted environments. The ones show here are Ammonia 200ppm and Black Hole Halo.
VITRO ASEMIC: a typeface grown in the Zone (actually based on bacteria grown in petri dishes) with its characters replaced by otherworldly shapes.
If you want more strange or nature-inspired fonts, check out these other selections: “Wizard Runes” and “Hopeful Solarpunk”.
I want to try something different for the next selection: explore heavily codified aesthetics of fiction, look at some of the current trends and see how we can push them further. I want to start with TTRPG staples and see if the concept has legs. Hope you’ll enjoy it!
Creative fuel
As I mentioned above, this month was mostly dedicated to job-searching so I didn’t have much time for personal projects. But I did manage to work on a linocut for my godson. It took me about 8 hours to carve this lowercase “a” (uppercase for when he gets older), and phew type design is hard! I’m super happy with the result though so it was well worth the effort.
That’s it for this month, thanks for reading!
This typeface is part of large collection of 729 public domain fonts from Typodermic Fonts. I didn’t check them all but I’m sure there are more great fonts waiting to be found!