Hi all! I’ve designed Farro for Grayscale—the company I’m currently working for—as an attempt to replace the current display typeface we’re using, and potentially we want to use Farro for clients’ projects as well.
Farro is a display typeface which has a joyful, whimsical personality in its shape. It currently has the 215 glyphs required by
Google fonts submission along with a few more glyphs, and we will most probably add more glyphs in the future.
Whilst we haven’t started with kerning yet, we’d already love to hear all critiques and comments from you guys in order to improve the font to a level where it’s ready for a professional release (We want to make the font open source and would love to release it through Google Fonts). Any comments will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks a lot!



Comments
1) I like it!
2) I would characterize it as sturdy and idiosyncratic. "Joyful and whimsical" seems a stretch.
Agree
The truth is that we’ve tried to use the Farro with the current branding we have; it doesn’t work as good as we’ve expected. And since we don’t plan on doing a brand overhaul again soon, the chance of us actually using Farro as our brand typeface is quite low.
@Marc Oxborrow
I’m glad you like it.
@Marc Oxborrow @Chris Lozos
Just had a conversation here at the office and we do agree that “Joyful and whimsical” might not be the most accurate description of the typeface, we are now leaning towards something like “peculiar.” Thanks for the suggestion!
@AbrahamLee
Thanks for noticing this! Updated the metrics and should be working alright now. I’ve attached the new kit here.
Concerning adjectives, what about spunky and muscular? :-)
I would slant the top-left of T and Z the other way. In the V the rigt diagonal could be a little thicker. In the K the top diagonal could be thinner.
I like the flaring of the j, maybe other letters could use some more flaring as well.
the Q doesn't really fit.
Have you tried adding that little fling from the 2 to the 5 and 7?
I think the period and comma need to be much bigger, but it would be easier to judge with a more texty sample.
Muscular might be a bit too strong for the typeface; we want it to be friendlier
@Jasper de Waard
I agree the /Q does need some more “taste” to it, might need to rethink the shape of it.
I made a textier sample and it does look like the comma and period should be bigger, Do they have a correlation to the tittles on /i and /j?
Thanks for the suggestions! Will work on the soon and post an update here.
i would say maybe a martial artsy vibe
text example maybe not in blockstyle to determin word space.
seems like it could be a tad larger.
also sidebearings in generall in the paragraphs seems tight to me
r seems awefully whide compared to the t
the descender of the g could use some more space from the upper part
I rather like it. Strong olive flavor, but not rancid at all.
Your ð doesn't work, though. Bowl too small, top unbalanced.
And don't bother about the tittles when designing punctuation. They will usually have similar shapes, but can have very different sizes.
The new kit has been attached below, feel free to give it a test and give us more critiques
Thanks for the link, that’s very useful! I hope I got it right this time
I’ve also edited the width of /space in the light master as I found it too wide.
New kit with updates attached.
After more than half a year, there’s finally some updates with the project.
Although by no means Farro is perfect (especially with the spacing,) we are happy enough with the result, and we think it’s ready to see the world.
We’ve created a mini site for Farro so everyone can play with it a bit: https://playground.grayscale.design/farro/
Any comments and suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Hope you guys have fun!
I think m, n, h, u are a bit narrow.