Product Reviews

Brush fonts are hardly new, but most are over-formalised and artificial. The problem with designing a believably humanistic brush-style font lies in the way characters work together. With Gizmo, Nick Cooke tackled this by starting with a brush pen before scanning selected characters and tracing them directly.

Careful kerning helps close up letter pairs throughout, making the default setting of text feel more like the real thing. What's more, ligatures provide a smidgen of alternate character options and there's a full range of accents and symbols. The result may not be your cup of tea, but it does feel like a real brush pen script, solving at least one of the problems of its typographic genre. Use them large to take advantage of the rough edges reproduced from the original brush strokes.