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And unlike its forbears, Megabase uses different thicknesses depending on how busy the letter is: T (one horizontal stroke) is thicker than C (two horizontal strokes), which in turn is thicker than E (three horizontal strokes). While most faces in the genre compensate for their thick tops and bottoms by thinning out the middle strokes, Megabase lets all horizontals remain thick. I’m not entirely sure what I’m trying to do with Megabase, but I think I’m interested in synthesizing the lumbering unevenness of the 19th-century designs with the slick sci-fi curvature of the 20th-century ones. Recent releases include Anouk, Maelstrom Sans, and Signal Compressed, and just the other week, we learned that Cheee began as an interpretation of Sintex. Interest in the horizontal-stress sans continues to this day. I don’t think I’m 100% satisfied with any of the individual faces from this era (except maybe Jackson), but I definitely sought to capture some of their funkiness in my interpretation. The genre truly hit its stride in the late 1960s and early 1970s, taking on a new space-age resonance with typefaces such as Sintex, Strada, and Zipper. I love these 19th-century designs such as Gothic Bold (pictured above), and how clunky and uneven they dared to be. Typeface designers have been trying to solve the puzzle of the horizontal-stress sans since the early days of sans-serif type examples of “Italians” with the serifs removed go back as far as 1840. Mechanical from Rob Roy Kelly’s American Wood Type. The overall texture is punctuated by black bands at irregular heights, like the music roll from a player piano. Some words will have unsightly gaps in them, and others will feel way too heavy. I forced myself to embrace Megabase’s uneven color, allowing top-heavy, bottom-heavy, and diagonal forms to stick out like sore thumbs and interrupt the flow of reading. While the horizontal-stress fonts I’ve made in the past use their serifs to balance out the light and heavy parts of the letterforms, this month’s design has no serifs to fall back on. If even color is the measure of a typeface’s success, then Megabase fails spectacularly. Essentially, even color is what enables a typeface to remain more-or-less consistent regardless of what words are being set. Of course, by “color” I don’t mean red or blue or purple, but rather the “typographic color” that describes the overall texture and density of text on a page or screen. Most typefaces strive to set text with an even color. As always, you can sign up for as little as $24! Megabase is February’s installment of Font of the Month Club.