Counterpunch is a fortnightly letter about typefaces, the people who draw them, and the pages they end up on. This issue: how one variable font brought the 1970s soft serif back, one wonk at a time.
Wonky when you want it, sober when you don't.
Fraunces is a variable serif with four axes: weight, optical size, a softness axis that rounds the corners, and a wonk switch that lets the stems of the a, the n and the u lean the way they did in 1970s display faces like Windsor and Souvenir. Everything on this page set in it is live text. Resize the window, select the letters, copy them out.
Quirky ampersands & leaning stems, quietly.
optical size 144 · weight 500 · softness 40 · wonk on
The wonk axis is binary on purpose. The designers decided a half-leaning stem reads as a mistake, so the font offers the lean or it doesn't. Softness, by contrast, is a dial.
We put the two masters side by side at 144pt and trace what moves: the stem pitches, the top of the a gets a little gable, and the whole word gains about four percent of width. Then we explain why the designers chose a switch over a slider.
Fraunces credits a family tree that most people were taught to be embarrassed by. We go back to the paperback covers and the record sleeves and make the case that the softness was never the problem, the pairings were.
A bakery menu, a poetry chapbook and a dashboard that had no business using a soft serif. Two of them work, one doesn't, and the reason is optical size, not taste.
She spent nine years setting books for a university press before she started writing about the type instead of with it. The letter began in November 2024 as a note to six friends about why a footnote looked wrong, and it has kept the same shape since: one typeface, one argument, a specimen you can select.
Nothing here is sponsored. Foundries are named because their work is worth naming, and a typeface never appears because someone asked.
One email a fortnight. Unsubscribe in one click from any issue. The list is never sold, rented or shown to anyone, including the foundries we write about.