Keytop

Sometimes when designing a font it can start to feel similar to another one. Normally a quick flip to my page and I’ll find one that’s either similar enough that I should make drastic changes or it’s suitably different and I can continue. This one felt SO familiar but I couldn’t find anything in my pages, nor in my _incomplete, or old rejected deletions.

Unperturbed I dug into my original BASIN font collection, no joy, then finally to an image of an old 3″ Spectrum +3 disk of fonts I did back in the 80s. There it was, a font very similar to the one I was working on named “keyboard” — inspired by the heavy oblique letters on the key caps of the Amstrad-produced Spectrum +2 and +3.

Comparing them my new font was much better quality than the old attempt so I stuck with it and so here is my only heavy oblique font to date. Given the size limitations it may well be the only one I do in this style and it works quite well for titles but is a little too chunky for paragraphs of text.