Aerovant

Why I made it

A sci-fi title has to feel fast before anyone has actually read it, and wide letters do a lot of that work on their own. Stretched-out proportions read as speed and horizon, the same way they do on spacecraft hulls and race cars.

But in a game, the title font never stays in the logo. It ends up on the main menu, in HUD readouts, on a 200-pixel thumbnail and on stream overlays. I wanted Aerovant to hold up across that whole run, not just as one big word on a splash screen.

Wide, rounded, cut flat

Three decisions shape every letter. The proportions are extended, so words stretch out. The outer corners all share one rounded radius, which keeps it feeling machined rather than aggressive. And the diagonals are cut flat where they end, so A, K, R and V finish on clean horizontal edges that line up with the rest of the word.

I made it all caps on purpose. A wide display face gains very little from a lowercase, and in a game it loses a lot when a string shows up in the wrong case. So the lowercase keys simply type capitals, and every word keeps its look.

The numbers are built for interfaces. All ten digits share one width, and so do the maths signs, so a score, a countdown or a column of prices never wobbles.

Getting the joints right

Wide letters make small mistakes big, and the Light weight shows everything. In the final pass I rebuilt every diagonal so it meets its stem or bar exactly at a corner. The N's diagonal now starts at the inner top corner of one stem and ends at the inner bottom corner of the other, M, Z and 7 run straight out of their bars, and V and W lost the tiny spurs at their points. B now shares one waist stroke with a single clean notch, like the 8.

I rebuilt the rounded corners too. Early versions approximated each corner with lots of short straight segments. The fonts I ship use true curves with points at their extremes, which cut the number of points by more than half and keeps the outlines clean in any font editor.

How I tested it

All nine font files pass the OpenType Sanitizer that Chrome and Firefox use, and Font Bakery reports no failures. I set every pair of glyphs, 54,289 per weight, with kerning applied, and no pair comes closer than 60 units in 1,000, so nothing ever touches.

I checked the kerning in HarfBuzz, which browsers, modern apps and most engines use, and with FreeType's classic kerning call for older ones. Light, Regular and Bold group as one family in design apps, and I went through every glyph at large size in all three weights.