Confab

I released Confab on July 20, 2022. It was an exploration of hypermodernism in typeface design, a direction that takes inspiration from LCD digit forms and pushes them into abstraction. The idea was to remove the letterforms from their Latin roots as far as legibility would allow, while still holding onto a coherent rhythm.

Confab was built as an all-caps typeface. I constructed it from strict geometric shapes, but not according to the usual ruleset I’d apply to letter design. Instead, I used a system of alignments that intentionally broke conventional boundaries. Letters extend past where you expect them to, creating negative spaces and structural tensions that disrupt the sense of uniformity, but still manage to resolve into a cohesive alphabet.

I haven’t updated Confab since its release, and it hasn’t found an audience commercially. For me, it stands as a record of experimenting with geometry and legibility at their limits, testing how far abstraction can go while still remaining functional as a typeface.