Every glyph in Newell is built from three primitives: a vertical rail, a horizontal rail, and a 45° diagonal. Squared terminals. No curves anywhere — not because curves are hard, but because the constraint is the identity. Take the rails away and there’s no typeface; there’s just a font.
The alpha shipped in July: 61 glyphs, OFL-1.1, WOFF2 at 1.8KB — the entire face weighs less than most favicons. The build is declarative JSON glyph definitions → parametric Python → UFO → fontmake. Draw a letter by stating what it is, not by sketching it.
This week it got the thing every type release eventually needs and every side project puts off: a real specimen page at its own domain — newell.ink.
What the site is
A specimen, in the typefoundry sense: the face shown large, shown in context, shown at its weights, with the construction visible instead of hidden. The point of a specimen is to let someone decide in thirty seconds whether your face belongs in their project — which means showing the character, not just the alphabet. Newell’s character is architectural: display-only, uppercase-forward, happiest at sizes where the rails read as rails.
The honest limitations, still on display
v0.1 documents its edges rather than fixing them quietly: no lowercase, no kerning, S reads as Z (a direct consequence of the pure rails-plus-45° vocabulary — there is no primitive that makes an S), and several letters are rectilinear by necessity. These are in the changelog, not swept under it. A v0.2 weights backlog exists as fourteen open issues and will get worked when it gets worked.
The typeface now sits in the stack the way it always should have: Newell for display, monospace for structure, prose serif for reading. Three jobs, three faces, no overlap.
