Chunky Fonts

Chunky fonts and the difference between heavy and friendly

Two fonts can put the same amount of ink on the page and land in completely different moods. Give a thick stroke a square corner and a tight counter, and the word hits you. Round the same corner off, keep the counter open, let the letter spread a little, and the word smiles at you instead. That second setting is this whole category: mass with the edges taken off.

The shapes come from a specific stretch of the twentieth century. For most of printing history letters, could not be inflated or crowded, because each one sat on a metal body of fixed size and bodies don't overlap. Phototypesetting removed the body. Letters became images on film, and an operator could swell them, round them, push them together until they nearly touched. Food packaging and television design went first and hardest, because a soft fat letter makes a product look generous, and by the 1970s that had become the standard voice of anything sold to be enjoyed.

Which is what you're actually choosing when you pick one. Chunky type makes a claim about the product: this is approachable, this is for you, nothing here is difficult. If the brief calls for force or authority, the letters need their corners back and you want the heavy shelf instead. One practical note that follows from the history: because the style was born from a crowded setting, default tracking leaves these fonts looking unfinished. Close it up until the gaps between letters match the counters inside them, and the word settles into the shape it was drawn for.

Chunky fonts by how the mass is shaped

• Bubble and inflated: letters that look pumped up from the inside, counters reduced to small openings.
• Rounded retro sans: soft-cornered geometric forms out of 1970s packaging and titling.
• Cartoon display: uneven bouncing weight with animation energy in it.
• Chunky slabs and serifs: blunt serifs and heavy brackets, mass with a little structure holding it.
• Papercut and handmade: edges that look cut with scissors instead of drawn.
• Roughened cuts: the same designs with texture built in, for one large word where the edge is visible.

In color, and reversed out

Of everything in our type library, chunky type is the one that does the most with flat color, because thick stroke holds a hue. If you put the same color into a thin letter, it drifts toward gray at any distance — since there isn't enough ink there to read as a color at all. So with these fonts you can drop the effects entirely. Solid letters, flat background, done, and it'll beat anything you could layer on afterward.

Reversing is where it gets fiddly. Knock the same word out of a dark background, and it puts on weight, since light spreads visually against dark. The strokes thicken, the counters shrink, and a letter that had a comfortable opening at the start can close up into a solid blob. Go and look at the small round shapes: the "e", the "a", the "g". If they're filling in, drop to a lighter cut, or convert to outlines and open them by hand.

One more thing, and you won't like it. Set it bigger. Chunky type at a timid size doesn’t do its job at all, so you have to, even if it feels like shouting on screen. That's the size it wants to be.

Projects that call for chunky type

• Snack and confectionery packaging.
• Toys, games and children's products.
• Ice cream, soda and café branding.
• Pop and indie music posters.
• App icons and product marks aiming to look approachable.
• Sale, promo and campaign graphics.
• Merch for a young audience.