Hexcess™
My God, it’s full of hexagons!
Designed by Delve Withrington
In space, no one can read blackletter.
Gallery
Story & Status
Hexcess began as a sketch for a sci-fi heavy metal band logo but the project didn’t move forward and the sketch sat in my sketchbook for years. After re-discovering it, I realized how much I still wanted to explore these letterforms and set about making an entire typeface out of it.
Design-wise, this is an experiment using hexagons and novel forms derived from them to construct a condensed blackletter on a grid — a similar approach to that of Albrecht Dürer’s Constructed Textura of 1538. Several styles of blackletter were referenced to find forms that fit into the constraints of the design grid in a pleasing manner and with enough differentiation between glyphs (e.g. U-V) that would otherwise be too similar. In addition, Hexcess has high contrast, strong verticals, and swash glyphs, which altogether place this design light-years inside the display fonts quadrant (perhaps it should be named Janeway).
Is it easy to read? Um, no. In the grand tradition of heavy metal logos, readability wasn’t a high priority, but Hexcess is fun and looks pretty rad. 🤘
Use Hexcess for posters, album covers (please, somebody use it on an album cover), book titles, zines, and legal fine print.
Current Status & Update Plans
Version 0.7 • May 30, 2024
This typeface is already fully functional and ready to rock. See the current features and glyph set in their respective sections below.
The 2025 Hexcess Update Tour:
☐ Increase language support & localization
☐ Create oldstyle figures
☐ More discretionary ligatures
☐ Additional kerning as needed
•!•
Features
Additional features include: Localized Forms, Fractions, Ordinals, Case-Sensitive Forms, Discretionary Ligatures, Slashed Zero, and Contextual Alternates.
Glyphs
Basic Latin 94
Latin-1 Supplement 95
Latin Extended-A 103
Latin Extended-B 10
IPA Extensions 2
Spacing Modifier Letters 8
Combining Diacritical Marks 21
Greek and Coptic 4
Latin Extended Additional 17
General Punctuation 16
Currency Symbols 1
Letterlike Symbols 1
Mathematical Operators 11
Geometric Shapes 3
Alphabetic Presentation Forms 2
Latin Extended-D 2
Additional Glyphs 1
Hexcess supports 269 languages. View our language support page to see which.