Linear Tendon Font

IMPORTANT: if it's your first time downloading this font, I want you to just get it for free. Especially if you're idly downloading it without any specific idea of where to use it. If you end up liking the font, you can come back and use the "Name your own price" feature like a donations page.

Linear Tendon is an experimental negative-space typeface with four styles: Regular, Shatter, Viscid, and Shatter Viscid. It's not very easy to read, but that was never the intention of the font.

I've always been interested in the negative space around letters, but the real genesis of this font happened when I visited the Letterform Archive and saw their exhibit on Piet Zwart. Specifically, I saw a large bold K that was lying on its back. In its size and orientation it looked like something completely abstract. Well, completely abstract in a different way than the Latin alphabet normally is. It made me consider the white space around the form, grabbing inwards.

The result of that idea is Linear Tendon, with its sinews reaching inward from various points of the letters. It's a kind of horrific, spider-webby thing. Fittingly, I gave it some variant styles: Shatter shifts all those negative space islands around, making it even more twisted and unreadable, Viscid turns the sinews goopy and ununiform, and Shatter Viscid applies both of those effects at the same time.

Because some small characters (like punctuation) don't lend themselves to the style, they are included as outlined forms in the font. A handful of glyphs have alternates, so you can choose if you want them to be sinewy or outlined.

I should also give a warning about the font: it may cause some lag or rendering issues. In a regular font, individual glyphs aren't supposed to be that complex, but some glyphs in Linear Tendon have over a thousand points (by the nature of being outlined intersecting lines). It hasn't been a problem for me and my computer, but if you're working with an old machine or finnicky software, be wary.

Linear Tendon is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, which means you are free to use it anywhere (books, posters, logos, websites, etc.) with no fuss. You can read more about the license here: https://openfontlicense.org