It is 11AM on a Monday and I am sitting in a café in The Hague listening to a heartfelt apology delivered in a quirky manner that makes it impossible for me to stay mad for the full hour Diplosopher, the typeface I am about to interview, kept me waiting for. Everything from its delivery of said apology to the effortlessly cool outfit and messy hair and even the way it orders a drink (doppio and a glass of cold milk) has an undertone of gentle chaos, like having an internal spring that has been wound a bit too tightly. But there is also an awareness, or in its own words: “I know I get rambly, but I promise it will be worth it. One way or another, at least.”

Six months of obsession, burnout, and brutal lessons. The truth? Fonts don’t end, but systems and collaboration make survival possible.

Studio for Type Design and Computational Crafts

‎Computing & Internet · 2025

Lei Sola ("To Her Only") is a quirky rich text typeface that takes delight in the restless and dramatic play of contradictory forms. It brings an eccentric intimacy to the text. Born in 2021 as a revival of "Testo di Milano" typeface, is the revival of a typeface I found on 17th-century documents in a flea market in my hometown, Turin. Lei Sola Roman Regular V0.0 is the first draft of 3 years ago, with some adjustments.

Antiphony is a dualistic type family exploring extremes and harmony through opposites. Its expressive design creates striking contrasts and dimensionality, making it ideal for complex layouts and dynamic compositions. Currently, Antiphony is available in 2 styles — Display Light Italic, and Display Light ContraItalic. However, The scope of the final family will include bold styles, heading styles, and potentially more down the road. You can check the writeup on my website for more details. Antiphony was conceived during the TypeMedia MA Type Design program at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.

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A new way of visualizing data on your screens The previous approach The new approach Merz is a lightweight wrapper around Apple’s CoreAnimation framework with a Pythonic API that allows for ergonomic, declarative and performant object drawing within RoboFont. Written and contributed by Tal Leming. You can find the detailed documentation here. A new way of visualizing data on your screens Merz is one of the major new features in RoboFont 4.0. Most users will not notice much difference from RoboFont 3.0, but it represents a radical change in how the application visualizes data on the screen. Rendering speed will enormously benefit from this shift. RoboFont’s extension ecosystem plays an important role in the overall user experience, so the RoboFont team will try to make it as easy as possible for tool developers the switch from mojo.drawingTools to Merz. Merz represents a substantial conceptual shift from mojo.drawingTools – and Drawbot. The mojo.drawingTools modules follow a strict procedural painter’s model: each drawing operation applies a layer of paint to an output canvas. The paint already applied cannot be modified, only new layers of paint can obscure or change the appearance of the previous layers. Differently, Merz adopts an object-oriented approach. It isn’t even correct to define Merz – and the Core Animation framework on which Merz relies upon – a drawing system itself. Merz is an infrastructure for compositing and manipulating data organized in layer objects. Or, in other words, Merz allows for creating visual layers of data. The previous approach Let’s compare two scripts returning the same output on the screen. The first one uses a drawbot-style approach. You can run this code in the Drawbot extension in RoboFont. myGlyph = CurrentGlyph() newPage(myGlyph.width, myGlyph.font.info.unitsPerEm) translate(0, -myGlyph.font.info.descender) drawGlyph(myGlyph) stroke(1, 0, 0) line((0, 0), (myGlyph.width, 0)) Open in RoboFont: merz_vs_drawbot_01.py Download: merz_vs_drawbot_01.py Look at the sequence of actions: the script accesses the glyph, creates a canvas, adjusts the canvas reference point, draws the glyph, set a line stroke, draws the baseline. It mimics the painter’s gestures. This drawing approach will keep working on RoboFont 4.0, but it is deprecated. It is considerably slower than Merz, and RoboFont 4.0 sets a resolution limit to mojo.drawingTools in order to preserve the user experience from rendering delays. The following screenshot is made using the WurstSchreiber extension – still using mojo.drawingTools – at 100%. So far, so good. But this is what happens if the users zoom in at 500%. The resolution limit kicks in, and contours become blurry. Not ideal, but a compromise. For this reason, the RoboFont team encourages extension developers to update their tools to Merz. Most extensions will become faster, and the object-oriented approach of Merz will make drawing code better adhere to the tool object structure. The new approach The following example uses Merz. You can run this code in the Merz Playground extension. myGlyph = CurrentGlyph() # a layer for the glyph and the baseline groupLayer = container.appendBaseSublayer( size=(myGlyph.width, myGlyph.font.info.unitsPerEm) ) glyphLayer = groupLayer.appendPathSublayer() glyphPath = myGlyph.getRepresentation(