From a dumb mockery of the overutilised "Swiss" type design to a semi-serious workhorse, Overused Grotesk turns itself into a copycat by imitating the most distinguishing features of the ubiquitous Helvetica. However the typeface doesn't stop at purely being a copycat; it wants to be a multipurpose and multilingual, though quirky and nonserious one.
This typeface was originally served as a form of "exhibition" for oblivious FontForge users. Unfortunately due to the superbly fast development, along with bad workflow and poor management, the project quickly became incomprehensible for an absolute beginner. Sooo oopsies
The fonts are free & open-source, and any contributions would be greatly appreciated. If you are planning to show this typeface to someone or submit it to a font collection, please remember to link this repository. It's not mandatory, but it saves a lot of headaches (trust me).
| Style name | wght | wdth | slnt | - | Style name | wght | wdth | slnt |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Light | 300 | 100 | 0 | - | Light Italic | 300 | 100 | -10 |
| Book | 350 | 100 | 0 | - | Book Italic | 350 | 100 | -10 |
| Roman | 400 | 100 | 0 | - | Italic | 400 | 100 | -10 |
| Medium | 500 | 100 | 0 | - | Medium Italic | 500 | 100 | -10 |
| SemiBold | 600 | 100 | 0 | - | SemiBold Italic | 600 | 100 | -10 |
| Bold | 700 | 100 | 0 | - | Bold Italic | 700 | 100 | -10 |
| ExtraBold | 800 | 100 | 0 | - | ExtraBold Italic | 800 | 100 | -10 |
| Black | 900 | 100 | 0 | - | Black Italic | 900 | 100 | -10 |
Traditionally, all possible weights and styles have been separated out into different font files, whereas variable fonts combine all of those variations into one. Because of this, overall file size is greatly reduced compared to loading multiple individual font files—and that’s a key consideration for web typography.
More information about variable font can be found on Google Fonts' Introducing variable fonts article written by Elliot Jay Stocks.
base.css
:root {
--font-sans: "Overused Grotesk", -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", "Roboto", "Oxygen", "Ubuntu", "Cantarell", "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;
--font-serif: Georgia, Times, serif;
--font-mono: Menlo, Courier, monospace;
}
@font-face {
font-family: "Overused Grotesk";
src:
url("../fonts/OverusedGrotesk-VF.woff2") format("woff2 supports variations"),
url("../fonts/OverusedGrotesk-VF.woff2") format("woff2-variations");
font-weight: 300 900;
}To reduce Cumulative Layout Shift you can preload font and use Font Face Observer to display font blazingly fast.
base.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>Static HTML is King 👑</title>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/base.css">
<link rel="preload" href="/fonts/OverusedGrotesk-VF.woff2" as="font" type="font/woff2" crossorigin>
</head>
<body>
<main>
<h1>Static HTML is King 👑</h1>
</main>
<!--
https://fontfaceobserver.com/
To load a font, call the load method on a FontFaceObserver instance.
It’ll return a promise that resolves when the font loads, or rejected when the font fails to load.
-->
<script src="/js/fontfaceobserver.js"></script>
<script>
var font = new FontFaceObserver('Overused Grotesk');
font.load().then(function () {
console.log('Overused Grotesk has loaded.');
}).catch(function () {
console.log('Overused Grotesk failed to load.');
});
</script>
</body>
</html>Before v1.0
- More widths (5 static widths: Compressed - Condensed - Normal - Extended - Wide)
- 3 width masters * 2 weight masters * 2 slant masters = 12 total masters
After v1.0 - Before v2.0
- Greek
- Small caps
- Building more accented letters (Latin-specific)
After v2.0
- New styles? Mono, Text, Micro? maybe not yet
- Cyrillic
- Kerning (LATIN, NUMBERS, etc.)
- Add diacritical marks & accented characters (Vietnamese support)✅ (05/08/2023)
- Stylistic set + Accented characters ✅ (08/08/2023)
- Sub- & superscript, denominators & numerators, slashed zero, tabular figures ✅ (14/08/2023)
- Try to figure out why Black weight has massive vertical height ✅ (20/08/2023)
- Circled + squared numbers (Character variant 01 - 04) ✅ (20/08/2023)
- 'cv01': Negative squared numbers
- 'cv02': Squared numbers
- 'cv03': Negative circled numbers
- 'cv04': Circled numbers
- Arrows ✅ (25/08/2023)
- Webfont support + css code ✅
- More currency symbols ✅️ (24/09/2023)
- Italic (for now) ✅️
- IPA (for now) ✅️
- Add serif 'I' (20/09/2023)
- Figure out why the WriteUFOLayer error occurs when merging sfds (20/09/2023)
- Fix kerning for 'y' with Stylistic Set 07 (20/09/2023)
- Add 'a.spur' for aesthetic reasons (cv05), although no accents (20/09/2023)
- REMOVE UNIWIDTH (22/09/2023) - poorly designed
- Add Discretionary Ligatures (fi, fl, ff, ffi, ffl) (10/12/2023)
- Add fractions (10/12/2023)
- Add a few mathematical notations (10/12/2023)
This project is under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. If necessary, please save or print this document for future references.
You can contribute to this project by opening an issue, creating a pull request, or by directly editing the source.
For more information, see CONTRIBUTING.md.
This section is just here for additional references.
- Donny Trương's Vietnamese Typography book
- Cyrillic Local Forms
- RoboFont's Creating designspace files with designSpaceLib
- fontTools' Creating a designspace