Josh Sawyer and Hannah Kennedy (Art Director & Concept Artist) had already done quite a bit of typographic research when we first spoke with them, and the Lettermatic team was compelled to do the same when we kicked off the project. We now have an entire shelf of books in our library dedicated just to Pentiment research: books of European manuscript writing from the period, Italian ‘italic hand’ masters, books of educational exemplars collected in the centuries since these styles were popular, and books on the history and evolution of these ‘hands’ as they progressed through time and geography.

“In a game with such a large cast, and that doesn't use voice acting, the fonts in the game play such a huge role in representing the character's voice and personality,” notes Hannah Kennedy, Art Director for Pentiment. “The level of effort put into making each font feel representative of different types of people makes our conversations feel so much more dynamic.”

Once I had crafted the underlaying skeleton for the design, my colleague Danelle Cheney worked on inking the design, by hand, over and over again using my drawings as a template. During this process Danelle cleverly incorporated the concept of a ‘skill axis’ in which the letters would be purposefully drawn to adhere to, or depart from, the template to various degrees, to simulate the in-game author’s level of skill with a pen. She drew progressively less and less accurate versions, finally writing a version with her left hand (her non-dominant hand) to truly capture the shaky and inconsistent letters of someone less familiar with writing. The core Humanist Script is a legible, easy to parse, and familiar texture that feels at home in the game, and familiar to readers. Via the game’s accessibility settings, you can even choose to see this Humanist Script design used consistently for all voices in the game, if you have any difficulty reading the other fonts in context.

Dave Bailey, a lettering artist and typeface designer who worked with Lettermatic at the time, focused on the Monastic Script, a typeface that captured Josh and Hannah’s favorite qualities of the vast landscape that is often referred to as ‘Blackletter.’ Even I was surprised at the sheer amount of names that exist academically for the various sub-genres of Blackletter, but our research led us to 4 primary classifications: Quadrata, Semi-Quadrata, Precissa, and Rotunda. While reviewing samples of each, we found a mixture we were all fond of, and Dave set out capturing those details in a new design. The Monastic Script also had the same kind of trajectory from ‘perfectly captured’ to ‘purposeful imperfection,’ eventually gaining rounded ink bleed details, and imperfect edges on strokes, to better capture the result on a printed page, rather than the core intent of the raw calligraphy. Whereas the initial drafts had been recorded with crisp, perfect-looking strokes, the true beauty was in capturing the appearance of gently bleeding ink. Amplified, of course, by the clever rendering system created by Brett Klooster (Programming Director) at Obsidian.

This design is formed from a very ‘picket fence’ texture, and so the art is in capturing the careful departures from that repetitive series of vertical lines, to differentiate one glyph from another. Narratively it made sense that this kind of letter would be drawn slowly, and purposefully, by someone skilled with a pen, so Dave incorporated details like gently bowing vertical stems that suggest the skill of the lettering artist. The design even has tiny purposeful overlaps that reveal the underlaying structure of individual strokes and how they happen to overlap, rather than hiding those behind a lens of perfection in which the letter disguises its own creation. With the humanity shining through, these letters feel authentic.

The lore of the game also pointed towards a need for a design different from all the others; rather than a digital typeface replicating writing, this would be a digital typeface replicating the appearance of early metal typefaces, with ‘sorts’ (individual glyphs) that could be re-arranged infinitely on a printing press. The in-game character of Claus Drucker makes reference to his wife, Marie Druckeryn, creating all of their woodcuts and type for their print shop. Drucker means ‘printer’ in German — and in this century, it was common for women to have feminine endings such as “-yn” on their surnames. As an homage to Marie, we wanted a woman type designer on our team to design the Printer Type font, so Danelle took the lead on this design.

For this research, we naturally went back to the surviving samples of very early metal typefaces, specifically the work of Nicolas Jenson, who cut a typeface over 500 years ago that would look familiar to modern readers today. The eponymous typeface Jenson, as we know it today, was Nicolas’s attempt to move humanist manuscript writing away from pens and ink, and over to the printing press. We also looked at the work of Claude Garamont (circa 1530), and Francesco Griffo (circa 1498) for reference. These designs, when viewed as a series, paint a picture of a texture and style that was pioneering at the time, and Danelle’s Printer Type design aspires to capture this tone, while adding in a bit of unique spirit. Danelle found little details from historical samples, and worked them in as if to suggest the preferences of Marie Druckeryn, like the star-shaped dots on the ‘i’ and ‘j’. Much later, when the world finally learned of Pentiment’s name and saw the logo, we were delighted to see these star shapes had found their way into the promotional materials as well. A couple other callouts from this design would be the ‘M’ with apex serifs, and the ‘g’ with a unique crossover tail design.