Curlew
Hook

View the specimen

PDF, 6 pages, A4 (opens in new tab)

I wanted to know what it takes to make a typeface, not just use one. So I gave myself a brief: a poster face that sounds like me.

The starting point was a poster in the Stedelijk Museum collection: Kho Liang Ie (attributed), poster with a design for a typeface, early 1970s. Square, stencilled, a little stubborn. I wanted to make it more square and lean it toward my own logo.

My logo has its own roots in Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet (1967). So the typeface became a bridge: from Kho’s poster to the source of my own mark.

The name. Curlew Hook is a perfect anagram of Crouwel + Kho (C-R-O-U-W-E-L-K-H-O). The curlew (wulp) is a bird I see on my birding walks; the hook describes the chamfered letterforms. The runner-up was Halo King, an anagram of Kho Liang.

The credit line, built into the font itself: Loosely after Kho Liang Ie and Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet.

Every letter follows the same handful of rules. Crouwel kept a strict grid; I gave myself more leeway, but the rules had to hold.

• One stroke. A single stroke width, flat ends, capitals only. The stroke is 1/7 of the cap height.
• No curves. Curves become straight lines with 45° corners, on the bottom corners only, like my logo. A and M are the exceptions: an upside-down U and W.
• One crossbar band. Every crossbar sits in the same band in the middle of the letter: A, E, F, H, the 4, the &. The bands line up across a word, so a line of type reads as a grid.
• Spacing from the stroke. Two straight letters sit exactly one stroke apart, Crouwel’s rule. Chamfered, open and diagonal edges get less, so they look the same.
• Tight lines. Default line height is the cap height plus one stroke, about 80% of the type size. It is a poster face; the lines should lock together.

Nineteen versions. Every version was kept, with the options I said no to.

B, D, P, R

Kho’s stencil gaps were the first thing I changed. First the tops closed, with a 45° cut where the bowl turns. Then, in another round of minimalism, the last gap became a 45° notch where the crossbar meets the stem. A fully closed version made D read as O and B as 8, so that one stayed out.

The notch spreads

Later A, E, F and H got the same notch. That small cut is the one detail that is neither Kho nor Crouwel. It’s mine.

K

Three rounds. The final K I drew myself in Illustrator, borrowing the angle of the ẞ. I chose square feet over chamfered ones: I was trying to make it too fancy.

The ampersand is also my own drawing, imported into the font as it was.

IJ

I love the IJ in the Rijksmuseum logo. Curlew Hook has a full-width J with the I hovering above it, starting at the crossbar band. In Dutch text it appears automatically.

S and 5

My first test posters showed “IS” reading as “15”. The 5 lost its hook; the S stayed. Dots in every numeral and an S with every corner cut were tried and rejected.

Nothing was wasted. Rejected options now live in the font as stylistic sets: the earlier K, a calmer percent sign, a zero without its dot.

What changed in each version of Curlew Hook

Version	What changed
v0.1–v0.2	First alphabet, then the spacing system built from the stroke
v0.3	B, D, P, R closed at the top
v0.4	All crossbars into one band
v0.5	Stencil gaps replaced by a 45° notch
v0.6	Dutch IJ ligature; zero gets a square dot
v0.7	First K redesign
v0.8–v0.9	My own ampersand
v0.10	Full punctuation; the Dot style; extra corners letter by letter
v0.11–v0.12	Western European accents and a capital ẞ
v0.13	My own K
v0.14	S and 5 separated
v0.15	Arrows at 45°, and a curlew hidden in the font
v0.16	Notch on A, E, F, H; optical correction
v0.17	Tabular figures and stylistic sets
v0.18	Group kerning for T, F and P
v0.19	Central and Eastern European accents; language rules

The hardest calls were the ones where the obvious fix made the font worse.

• Keeping the chaos. B, D, E, P and R keep a square top-left corner, while F, H, N and T are cut. I was tempted to make it consistent. I kept it on purpose: the system has a pulse instead of a pattern. The spacing was then tuned to even it out, so the irregularity reads as character, not as a mistake.
• Readability is not the brief. S and 5 are close, and so are a few other pairs. For a minimal display face I accepted that, and set a rule for myself instead: numbers get their own size or their own block.
• Less digital. Halfway through, it started to feel like an 80s calculator. From then on, every extra detail had to earn its place, and anything that pushed it further toward digital was dropped.
• Moving away from the source. The optical correction (horizontal strokes slightly thinner than vertical ones) takes the font a step away from New Alphabet’s strict geometry. Barely visible, but more refined. I chose refinement.

An alphabet is 26 letters. A typeface is everything around them. This is the part nobody sees, and the part I enjoyed most.

Every accent is its own character

When you type Ä, your keyboard sends one code for “A with umlaut”, not an A plus two dots. If a font has no Ä, your software quietly swaps in another font. My first test posters showed exactly that. Curlew Hook now builds about 90 accented capitals from a small set of marks, all in the same language: square dots, 45° strokes, one stroke thick.

Getting the details right

• Romanian Ș takes a comma below; Turkish Ş takes a cedilla. They look alike and are often swapped. Both are in, and they are different.
• In Turkish, I and İ are two different letters. That matters for the next point.
• Slovak writes the caron on L as a small hook beside the letter (Ľ), not above it.
• All marks below the line stop at the same depth.

The Dot style meets the dot accent

The Dot style gives capitals the square dot from my logo. But the dot above (İ, Ż, Ė) is the same square. In Dot, a plain I looked like İ, which is wrong in Turkish. The fix: language rules inside the font. Set your text to Turkish, Polish, Lithuanian or Maltese and the clashing dots disappear automatically. Everywhere else they stay.

Optical correction

Horizontal strokes are 92 units, vertical ones 100. Your eye sees horizontals as heavier, so they are made slightly thinner to look equal.

Tabular figures

Normally a 1 is narrower than an 8. For timetables and price lists, a switch makes every digit the same width so columns line up.

Kerning

The T, F and P are spaced in groups: they move away from letters with a flat top and tuck in next to cut corners and rounder shapes. 58 pairs nobody will notice, and every poster looks calmer for it. The details are the details.

Did I step on anyone?

I ran the font through WhatTheFont. It found 93 “similar” fonts in the MyFonts library; none share the system.

Curlew Hook comes in two styles, Display and Dot, with about 190 characters each: capitals, numerals, full punctuation, arrows, accents for most European languages, and a curlew hidden inside (type CURLEW with discretionary ligatures on).

It now sets the headlines on this site, paired with Klein Text for body copy. And it holds up on posters: eight test layouts, from a Swiss grid to letters used as architecture.

Download it, free

Curlew Hook is released under the SIL Open Font License: use it for anything, including commercial work. Made something with it? I’d love to see it.

Download Curlew Hook

ZIP, 57 KB — both styles (OTF), type specimen, readme and license. Version 0.19.

Type specimen (PDF)