a quick and dirty typeface by Feòrag

St. John's Church, at the west end of Princes Street in Edinburgh is famous, nay infamous, for its murals painted on a large board outside the building. Often controversial, and addressing contemporary issues, they've appeared regularly since 1982. In 2016, I was involved in the creation of their World AIDS Day mural, based on that year's theme "HIV Not Retro". Part of what I did was to paint the lettering for the hashtags at the bottom, which had been roughed out in chalk by Greg, the artist.

This font was done quickly, based on that lettering, and tries to capture some of what it was like working in paint, with old brushes, in freezing temperatures, on a Sunday morning (not a time with which I am familiar).

The character set is therefore much smaller than usual, and the only special character is the awareness ribbon. This is mapped to the "bullet" glyph. There's still a good range of accents.

The image below gives a sample of some of the characters included in the font:

The typeface comes in two 'flavours'. The OTF version is PostScript-flavoured OpenType; the TTF is TrueType-flavoured OpenType. Both should work on MacOS X, Linux and Windows systems. If you use MacOS 8 or 9, only the OTF version will work on these systems. If you have a PostScript printer, you should also choose the OTF version.

This typeface is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1

While the font is free for you to use and adapt, with very few conditions attached, if you do use it and enjoy it, please consider making a donation to a local charity which cares for people living with HIV. In Scotland, that would be Waverley Care. Copies of anything on which it's used would be nice, too.

Download OTF version 1.1 [Zip 582 Kb]
Download TTF version 1.1 [Zip 582 Kb]