I knew that Pentiment was doing far more with its fonts than most games, but I still underestimated how meticulous their creation ended up being. Riley Cran, the founder and lead designer of font firm Lettermatic, told me that Pentiment was a special case. Lettermatic designs most fonts to support a variety of weights and widths (light, bold, instalaciones barcelona etc.), but there are tricks to speed up that process. For Pentiment, “a much, much higher amount of those drawings were created individually. It was someone sitting there actually drawing it by hand,” Cran says.

A Pentiment font isn’t just 52 glyphs (aka unique versions of a letter, like lowercase and capital). To replicate real handwriting, many letters need to be drawn in multiple ways to reflect where they appear in a word, or to add subtle differences between the writing styles of different characters. Creating those minute variations just wasn’t going to work digitally.

“If you want to have two letter ‘As’ that don’t match in the sense that they look like someone’s hand drifted ever so slightly when creating one of those strokes, drawing that digitally is going to fight you more than help you. So that’s why we had to do this analog process,” Cran says. Lettermatic drew the fonts on paper and then scanned them digitally to capture the effects of pen on paper.