Indoor Kid
David Jonathan Ross · David Jonathan Ross · 2024
A variable comic book lettering superfamily developed with comics writer Ellis Bojar, offering a wide range of widths, weights and a custom Emphasis axis for typesetting dialogue and captions.
About
Built over nearly three years of research into pre-digital comic book letterers including Gail Beckett, Tom Orzechowski and Gaspar Saladino, Indoor Kid synthesises their approaches into a flexible variable font system rather than reviving any single hand. A custom Emphasis axis allows letterers to enlarge and vertically centre words within a text block in a single slider movement, solving a longstanding copyfit problem in digital comics production. Three character variants per letter add baseline bounce, and the glyph set includes manga-influenced symbols such as breath marks, stars and musical notes.
Classification
Designed explicitly to replicate the conventions of pre-digital comic book lettering, with variable width and weight axes and features specific to comics typesetting; sits firmly in the display category as a specialised lettering system rather than a general-purpose text face.