Font: Masterpiece

After hours of laboring, Sarah finally finished Masterpiece. The Rainy Day method of designing a font requires a lot of patience, as the starting point, length, and end to each stroke or line is determined by where we place our fingers on the screen.

We're using an iPad app that does not allow for zooming in on points, so every letter we make is consistently the size of a book but constructed with points only millimeters in size. This requires so much precision that even NASA would baulk to design a font more elaborate than a handwriting sketch.

But Rainy Day Fonts is always up for a challenge, and a true serif font has been absent for too long. Reminiscent of other transitional serif typefaces such as Georgia or Baskerville, Masterpiece maintains a vertical stoke stress. 

We can't truly mask the fact that it was still hand-made, though.

Touches of disproportion and unevenness give it a certain character that would be sought-after by those who love the unpredictability of old punch-cut versions of fonts like Bembo, Garamond, or Caslon; a style to it that would be treasured by those who look for those unbalanced keys in typewriters, the ones that seem to leave their own signature through their lack of proper weight distribution; a subtle suggestion of its true tangibility to be enjoyed by those who are fascinated by the sort of type produced by matrices during the letterpress era, where the an 'e' in a slab might differ from one in the next line.

After all, isn't that what makes a chef d'ouvre? Its the little imperfections, the small peculiarities of a piece of work that makes it so treasured. The Tower of Pisa would not attract so many tourists if it didn't lean. That mysterious smile on Mona Lisa is what makes her stand out from other portraits. 

Pair Masterpiece, a small caps font, with a sans-serif body text, like Helvetica or Proxima Nova. Or with Rainy Day Fonts like Lavender or New Radio. 

Download Masterpiece, and enjoy those those inconsistencies. It took a long time to make them.

Download this font!*


*All Rainy Day Fonts are free and in the public domain. Please download, share, and pin this font!