Rustic is a small family of pen-inspired, slab serif weights. It’s available exclusively on Fontstore. You could view it as my tribute to F.H. Ehmcke’s lovely, 100-year-old Ehmcke-Rustika.

Rustic is a family of serif fonts ideal for use private-press—style book design, or in restaurant menu design. It is inspired by Ehmcke-Rustika, a 1914 typeface of Fritz Helmuth Ehmcke’s. The Rustic family includes five weights, ranging from Regular through Heavy. The default numerals in each font are proportional lining figures, but oldstyle figures are available via an OpenType feature. Each font also includes several Stylistic Sets. The first offers an alternate lowercase ‘e’, with a rounder beak. The second, third, and fourth include glyph alternates that were common in German-language typesetting a century ago. Specifically, there is an ‘f’ with a descender, as well as an alternate ‘ß’, whose form matches the descending ‘f’ and the fonts’ long ‘s’ glyphs. There are also ‘ch’ and ‘ck’ ligatures, plus ligatures combining the long ‘s’ with ‘ch’, ‘ck’, and ‘t’. Finally, there are versions of ‘Ä’, ‘Å’, ‘Ö’, ‘Ü’, and ‘Ů’ with lowered diacritical marks. The fifth Stylistic Set includes a ‘g’ that is more like the form used in the original Ehmcke-Rustika. The sixth Stylistic Set has ‘tt’ and ‘tz’ ligatures. Rustic features very large capitals; they are the same height as the tops of the lowercase’s ascenders. The type design retains a number of calligraphic ‘artefacts’, which look as if they were written with a broad-pen. Nevertheless, the design of Rustic’s letterforms is a little too modelled for it to be a representation of actual calligraphic writing.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
1234567890
({[.,¡!¿?*'‘’"“”]})
$€£%@&¶§¢†‡

Every typeface has its own inherent rhythm, created by the designer who made the font. With typefaces that are intended for use in body text, it is primarily this rhythm that will make the typeface readable. But there are additional factors that go into the making of a good text face: the space between the letters, the degree of contrast in the letters’ strokes, as well as the x-height and relative size of the whitespace inside of the letters. Not every typeface that works well in text will apply all of these factors in the same way, but all good ones will have many of these features in common. 1234567890

36 px

Every typeface has its own inherent rhythm, created by the designer who made the font. With typefaces that are intended for use in body text, it is primarily this rhythm that will make the typeface readable. But there are additional factors that go into the making of a good text face: the space between the letters, the degree of contrast in the letters’ strokes, as well as the x-height and relative size of the whitespace inside of the letters. Not every typeface that works well in text will apply all of these factors in the same way, but all good ones will have many of these features in common. 1234567890

24 px

Every typeface has its own inherent rhythm, created by the designer who made the font. With typefaces that are intended for use in body text, it is primarily this rhythm that will make the typeface readable. But there are additional factors that go into the making of a good text face: the space between the letters, the degree of contrast in the letters’ strokes, as well as the x-height and relative size of the whitespace inside of the letters. Not every typeface that works well in text will apply all of these factors in the same way, but all good ones will have many of these features in common. 1234567890

18 px

Every typeface has its own inherent rhythm, created by the designer who made the font. With typefaces that are intended for use in body text, it is primarily this rhythm that will make the typeface readable. But there are additional factors that go into the making of a good text face: the space between the letters, the degree of contrast in the letters’ strokes, as well as the x-height and relative size of the whitespace inside of the letters. Not every typeface that works well in text will apply all of these factors in the same way, but all good ones will have many of these features in common. 1234567890

12 px

Every typeface has its own inherent rhythm, created by the designer who made the font. With typefaces that are intended for use in body text, it is primarily this rhythm that will make the typeface readable …

80 %

Every typeface has its own inherent rhythm, created by the designer who made the font. With typefaces that are intended for use in body text, it is primarily this rhythm that will make the typeface readable …

60 %

Every typeface has its own inherent rhythm, created by the designer who made the font. With typefaces that are intended for use in body text, it is primarily this rhythm that will make the typeface readable …

40 %

Every typeface has its own inherent rhythm, created by the designer who made the font. With typefaces that are intended for use in body text, it is primarily this rhythm that will make the typeface readable …

20 %

Try Rustic

Play with the sample text or just type your own …

Every typeface has its own inherent rhythm, created by the designer who made the font. With typefaces that are intended for use in body text, it is primarily this rhythm that will make the typeface readable. But there are additional factors that go into the making of a good text face: the space between the letters, the degree of contrast in the letters’ strokes, as well as the x-height and relative size of the whitespace inside of the letters. Not every typeface that works well in text will apply all of these factors in the same way, but all good ones will have many of these features in common. 1234567890

Rustic is available on: