table of contents

• this table
• julius sans one
• ysabeau sc
• gruppo
• alike angular
• cormorant garamond
• darker grotesque
• starborn
• font shortlist (what comes next?)
• an aside (confronting my semi-bilingualism)

JULIUS SANS ONE

(bold variant used for readability)

the name fits, so so well! it does remind me of ancient rome! i use it as the heading/display text for my oh hellos shrine. julius sans one is related to ancient rome by its name, which references julius caesar. additionally, a font that is similar to julius sans one is used in the oh hellos' four winds album covers, where the albums are inspired by greco-roman aesthetics.

the font is in all-caps - with mostly straight lines, which sounds a bit boring - but it deviates from the straight lines in interesting ways. look at that q! ↓

Q

it's so extra! and how the j just keeps going down...

J

when i originally wrote about this font, i neglected to mention that this style of font is called 'roman type'. so if you want to know more about these types of fonts, there's your keyword!

i love the font, and i'm so happy i found it for the shrine. however, i noticed that it is hard to read when small, so for the smaller text in the oh hellos shrine...

YSABEAU SC

this font looks even more like it was carved into a slab! i believe i found it on google fonts by going in reverse-alphabetical order. all the letters are equal-height (at least in lowercase) and easier to read at small sizes than julius sans one, which is why i use it as the body text in my oh hellos shrine. if i made the font slimmer, it would look relatively similar to julius sans one, but i don't want to mess up readability.

GRUPPO

(bold variant used for readability)

the font used on the pokepop shrine! i love it a lot!!! it reminds me a little bit of phone brands like oppo and htc, but that's not why i like it.

to me, gruppo is very confident in how it looks. it's based on rounded squares, but instead of the rounded bubble craze in ui designs, gruppo is iconic to me. i've seen fonts like it before, but Gruppo just feels like the essence of a sleek, cool, car. or maybe a well-designed pen. Gruppo is a font that gives me a lot of joy and i hope the designer gets to know that this font is aesthetically pleasing to many...

but i just looked through the other fonts they've made, and THEY'VE MADE OSWALD, NUNITO, AMATIC SC, PACIFICO, AND SIX CAPS (WHICH IS ALSO IN MY FONT LIST)? i know so many people who've used and seen these fonts, and i am frankly shocked that one person could make so many popular fonts. his name is Vernon Adams.

i searched for their name to see how many people have acknoledged Vernon Adams' work, and i discovered that he has passed away in 2016, and his family has been experiencing financial difficulties as the family recieves no royalties for his work. i have found a way to support the Adams family, at sansoxygen.com, but i cannot donate money at this time (on account of not being able to transfer money online). i am linking the donation page, as i am hoping that at least one person who sees this page can donate to Vernon's family.

Alike Angular

the font for my site! wow! some might wonder, why did i use a serif font for my site, instead of a sans-serif font (the default for online media), or maybe even a monospace font, since that's what graces my eyes while i write for this site? (i'm writing in microsoft window's default notepad app right now, the font shrine is always the page that gets updated when i'm in less than ideal coding conditions)

truthfully, it's not because alike angular was the most pleasing to the eye when i was looking for fonts (although i love its jaggedness when you zoom in close, it would be perfect for something halloween themed). when i was looking for fonts, i was doing so with certain artists and bands in mind. "this gruppo font reminds me of that half•alive logo i mocked up! limelight reminds me of the music video for [redacted band], and girassol has that americana feel that the crane wives emulate!" and before i knew it, i had fonts that reflected what i liked in others, instead of how i wanted to present myself. out of the fonts i picked, the ones i had that were intended for 'general' use were cormorant garamond (one i think i may have used in the pre-sadgrl layout days of the site), and darker grotesque (the one i used in my pandemic-years school essays).

and then i thought, how sad was that? did i really want my writing to be in the font that i use for my school work? no way. i'll swap one of the fonts i intended for shrine use with cormorant garamond, i like its elegance but it's too elegant for a hobby project, and darker grotesque can remain with the fruits of my procrastination-fueled scripts.

alike angular looks like it was hardware-accelerated in the vector program it may have been designed in, and the program went to render it properly before it was interrupted by the export process. i like that. it reminds me of those essays i used to write in the pandemic, where the deadline was 11:59 pm, so i'd submit a google doc link instead of a word document so i could squeeze some extra minutes of writing in before i was forced to sleep and hope i'd get a good grade in the next afternoons. all the other fonts i picked make me feel like something i'm not. sure, i'll go with that. one year later, it's grown on me. i'm somewhat working on a new backend for the site, and in that redesign, i'm keeping the font, so i guess it was the right choice after all.

Cormorant Garamond

i have a memory of me in the early days of my site, encountering one of my first cryptic errors which was preventing me from applying this font to my site. i spelt 'cormorant garamond' as 'comorant gamarond'. the correct spelling is now next to the bundle of neurons which remember to close my tags and apostrophes.

like i said in my talk about alike angular, cormorant garamond is elegant, perhaps too elegant for me to write the majority of my site in. i used to think all serif fonts were fancy, but compare it to times new roman, and you can see the difference. wow, look at those serifs. so beautiful. it's hard for me to believe that i can just use this font wherever i want, but i can. look, this is what it would look like if wikipedia used this font:

it practically feels illegal. years of culture has conditioned me to associate serif fonts with wealth and prestige and cormorant garamond is the peak of that. i feel like i did when i was a child devoting my full attention to a chandelier for the first time, and realising this was why people worshipped physical representations of idols instead of gods.

Darker Grotesque

looking at this font still reminds me of online school. i have to remind myself that i'm not there anymore, and that i have to discuss this font irrespective of my experience with it. it's hard, but i can do it.

i like the f, g, and y; how they're flattened like the designers said 'no! you can't go beyond the bounding box!' and they had no other choice but to bend to their wills. when looking at the info about the font, i found out that it was made for vietnamese text. sweet. the accents are suprisingly readable, even at very small sizes, *grumbles* which is something that some arabic fonts could get better at, which is not what we're talking about *grumble over*. after finding out what grotesques are, i find that darker grotesque is very well-named. it has character that i can't describe. i guess you could say it's a little quirky, it has a certain je ne sais quoi, that beneath the first impression of 'just another sans-serif' font, you'll look at the J and Q and think- "i've never seen anyone do that before."

STARBORN

my friend used this font for an artfight id card, and when i saw it, i had to ask for the font! it's bubbly, dynamic, and uses cute little stars on some lowercase variants of the letters, especially a (A), i (I), and o (O)! there's also stars on some punctuation marks. i especially love how the full stop tucks under the asterisk to make this decorative shape:

*.

so much decorative opportunity, just from some thoughtful kerning!

even though the @, #, and $ don't have stars, i like how they look as well.

i can see why the percentage sign % doesn't have stars, but the lowercase a (A) seems a bit hard to understand for someone who has just encountered the font. i also wish that some actual star symbols were included in this font. i usually don't care about special characters like that, but this is the star font! hold that thought- how many stars are in unicode?

✦✧✩✪✫✬✭✮✯✰✴✵✶✷✸✹✺

woah, that's a lot! is that all? no!

⯨⯩⯪⯫🟀🟁🟂🟃🟄🟅🟆🟇🟈🟉🟊🟋🟌🟍🟎🟏🟐🟑🟒🟓🟔⋆⍟⍣★☆☪✡❂⚝⭑⭒

hm.

i see why the font designer didn't include these. i had to include images of the symbols because they load incorrectly on many devices! i tried to figure out which star is most popular and got heavily distracted. it's probably these ones ★☆ because their unicode names are nice and short (black star and white star respectively). but at the end of the day, the a being a star is growing on me. i'm satisfied with the asterisk-full stop combo. i'm forcing you to look at it again. it's so beautiful.

*.

what fonts could be next?

a collection of the google fonts featured

starborn

• free download for personal use on dafont
• commercial license

shortlisted before i started coding for this site:

• girassol
• limelight
• rock salt
• rubik spray paint
• rubik vinyl
• six caps
• water brush
• zeyada

found while browsing and not planned to be used:

• geostar fill
• fredericka the great
• caesar dressing
• splash
• tsukimi rounded
• mochiy pop one
• kodchasan
• climate crisis

sillies:

• wavefont
• flow circular
• redacted
• libre barcode 39
• noto color emoji

will not be reviewed:

• caprasimo

  (shortlisted before i started coding for this site)
  this font was originally made as a fallback for cooper black, and is based on a separate font called fraunces (the black variant), which is interesting, because it makes me feel like reviewing this font isn't enough. i should be reviewing all three to consider this one review 'complete'. by switching between tabs many times, i have concluded that caprasimo is slightly wider and thicker than fraunces black, with barely any other differences. cooper black is definitively the more famous and iconic one out of all three fonts, so it feels weird to review either of them before cooper black.

an aside