Ritualist™
Sharp as a knife and dangerously alluring.
Designed by Justin Penner
Rite of passage
A rite of passage is a ceremony or ritual of the passage which occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another. It involves a significant change of status in society. In cultural anthropology the term is the Anglicisation of rite de passage, a French term innovated by the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in his work Les rites de passage, The Rites of Passage. The term is now fully adopted into anthropology as well as into the literature and popular cultures of many modern languages.
Gallery
Story
Ritualist by Justin Penner takes inspiration from high-contrast wedge serif designs, like the 19th century typeface De Vinne, but viewed through a macabre lens. This seriously fascinating design is defined by its infinitely sharp points, and some dangerous curves that accelerate like the edge of a blade.
Occupying a surreptitious space between beauty and darkness, Ritualist is elegant, alluring, vaguely exotic, and don’t look now but it might be suspiciously watching from across the street.
The family comprises 18 styles (9 weights plus italics), and has a Variable version. The expansive set of over 1,000 glyphs in Ritualist makes it usable in hundreds of languages around the world, including full Vietnamese support, and support for languages that have local style preferences like Polish, Catalan, Marshallese, Romanian, Sami, and numerous African languages. The glyph repertoire also includes many IPA characters, thus enabling support for many indigenous languages in North America and elsewhere.
Use Ritualist as your new secret weapon when the creative brief requires your designs to give vibes of intrigue, darker desires, and mystical encounters. Set it large for arresting headlines and titles that dominate while preserving the mood with middle range of weights for subheads and brief bits of copy. Careful though, you may become obsessed with Ritualist — or so we hope. •!•
Ritualist is Steven Heller’s Font of the Month September 2025
Features
Additional features include: Localized Forms, Numerators, Denominators, Fractions, Superscript, Subscript, and Ordinals.
Variable Font Features
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Glyphs
Basic Latin 95
Latin-1 Supplement 95
Latin Extended-A 127
Latin Extended-B 148
IPA Extensions 27
Spacing Modifier Letters 14
Combining Diacritical Marks 32
Greek and Coptic 8
Latin Extended Additional 171
General Punctuation 21
Currency Symbols 22
Letterlike Symbols 7
Arrows 10
Mathematical Operators 16
Geometric Shapes 3
Alphabetic Presentation Forms 2
Latin Extended-C 4
Latin Extended-D 7
Additional Glyphs 40
Ritualist supports 459 languages. View our language support page to see which.