A downloadable typeface

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hOwdy is a dingbat typeface of weird, unusually happy faces! Uh, basically I made this so I could generate these faces in big grids or along paths or in other ways while designing layouts. If it helps you as well, then great! But really, this is ultra-niche and not particularly useful.

What's in the typeface?

There are 100 faces in all: pretty much every character you'll find on a QWERTY keyboard, plus a few secret ones.

It's got two levers for customisation:

  • 2 levels of detail (Rough and Smooth)
  • 2 levels of regularity (Irregular and Regular)

Irregular has the faces at the heights they were originally made, while Regular sets them all to be the same height and width (aside from spurs and ticks coming off the outside of each face).

Each font is provided in .otf, .woff, and .woff2 versions. The .zip archive also comes with the original highly-complex .svg files, each with the same name as the key that produces them.

How should it be used?

hOwdy is an ordinary dingbat font—each of its symbols is linked to a single uppercase letter, lowercase letter, number, punctuation mark, or other symbol. This means text-to-speech (TTS) software will read it as gibberish (unless you're putting hidden messages in there). Here are some ways you can use hOwdy right:

  • convert the letters to curves once you've typed them (e.g. using the 'convert to curves' function in Affinity Publisher).
  • putting them in a text frame and setting the frame to 'decorative' so that TTS software won't read it (this is possible in MS Word, for example).
  • using them to make vector or raster images that you then insert into your game/etc.

LICENSE

License: SIL Open Font License 1.1 (you can freely use it in commercial and non-commercial projects; read the full license terms here or in the text file that comes with the typefaces).

I made hOwdy using the free image editor GIMP, the website pngtosvg, the free version of the font designer BirdFont, and the font designer Glyphs Mini. For more information on how I made it, see this twitter thread!

Reviews

As a connoisseur ... with ... 1500 ... computer, I ... say ... Howdy ... definitely ... .

Brian Binh

More fonts!

Here are some of the other typefaces I've made—find more details on their itch pages, and more fonts and other tools and assets in my Fonts and Typefaces collection!

Updated 26 days ago
StatusReleased
CategoryAssets
Rating
Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars
(6 total ratings)
AuthorSpeak the Sky
Tagsdingbat, Fonts, otf, Royalty Free, typeface, weird, woff, woff2
Asset licenseCreative Commons Attribution_NonCommercial_ShareAlike v4.0 International
Average sessionA few hours

Download

Download
hOwdy v2_0.zip 840 kB
Download
hOwdy v2_0 Font Guide.html 127 kB

Development log

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