Process behind Dukat: shaping letters and ideas side by side

First ideas for the project emerged in the autumn of 2024. At the time, I was doing an internship at a French type design studio. Surrounded by the rich beauty of Paris and looking at typefaces every day, I felt an increasing urge to start working on a new typeface.

Typeface brief can take shape through different processes. In my case, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to work on something experimental, a project that would create a dialogue between historical letterforms and contemporary approaches.

More specifically, I wanted to explore Vyaz, an ornamental writing style derived from Byzantine culture that played a significant role in the history of Ukrainian writing. In terms of character, I was drawn to something sharp, carved, chiseled.

I began exploring the idea further, and by the time I was about to leave France I had already digitized a first set of letters. Gathering all my courage, I decided to show them at the studio and ask for honest critique. I received several helpful comments, but these words stayed with me the most: “The logic is there but it needs to be refined. Look at your “e” and now at your “n”, how their weight is distributed. Once you resolve this, the system will work”.

That was my first real aha! moment. How did I not notice this before? At some point working with modules took over and in some letters consistency had slipped away.

If rules are broken, it should happen intentionally. And usually, when one system is broken, another should replace it. With this in mind, a new phase of hand explorations began — the kind that, when you’re trying to truly understand something, is rarely neat or tidy.

At that point, I had a clearer sense of what I was looking for. Next — digitizing different concepts, choosing a direction, experimenting with proportions, and thinking about which axes I wanted to push. Should I make a very heavy version with only minimal counterspace? Should I work with optical sizes — varying the level of abstraction in the letterforms? Or should I push the width?

After a lot of experimentation, I decided that working with optical size and pushing the level of abstraction was the most interesting direction for what I wanted to achieve. I was working with two fonts, no interpolation. And even though everything seemed to be in place — I could continue refining the letterforms and expanding the character set — I wasn’t satisfied.

I kept asking myself: Is that it? Is this really how my final typeface is going to look? Something felt unresolved, but I couldn’t quite identify what was missing. So I left the project aside for a few weeks.

When I returned to it, I began looking again at my reference board and at my earlier sketches, where the idea of letter deconstruction had been present from the very beginning.

I also remembered a folder in my gallery called “Letters from the streets”. For some time I had been photographing signages — PVC letters on storefronts that start to delaminate over time under weather conditions.

This was my second aha! moment — the missing piece of the puzzle. I realized that I needed to design another master made only of bars: no distractions, just simple strokes drawn in a very specific way so that the shapes I had already designed could emerge from them.

With that, the structure of the project changed. Instead of working with two separate fonts, I switched to a variable one. Seeing the first variable test come to life was incredibly exciting!

Revisiting my references and initial inspiration also helped me solve another question — proportion. In Vyaz, spacing plays a key role in why the letters look so decorative. Simply put, the space between stems is equal to the stem itself. This creates a distinctive “barcode-like” rhythm, which I wanted to preserve.

Of course, some compensations were needed. “Rounded” letters required adjustments, more deconstructed forms needed more generous spacing. Still, this gave me a solid starting point and helped establish a clear principle for spacing.

After that, the process became more or less standard: designing, expanding the character set, proofing, iterating. Alongside general proofing, an important part of the process was constantly checking how the interpolation behaved and regularly returning to the drawings to keep the distortions under control, so to say.

At some point it was time to start thinking about the name. You can’t just call it XYZ and forget about it, right? I returned to my references — Vyaz, manuscripts, coins. I looked at the letters I had ended up with: very decorative, yet sharp.

Then I remembered Dukat (or Dukach) — a traditional Ukrainian women’s metal breast ornament made of a row of coins, usually centered around an embossed medallion. Recently, interest in it has been revived and it’s being actively incorporated into modern outfits. This felt like a perfect fit.

And just how sometimes you instinctively feel what name would suit a stranger, I looked at my typeface and could clearly say — yes, this is Dukat.

The process of creating Dukat often felt like carving and chiseling, shaping both the letterforms and the concept at the same time. Doubting, revisiting decisions, not being afraid to pivot, and experimenting were all part of bringing the idea to life. And once one idea is realized, it creates space for the next ones.

Check out Dukat — and stay tuned.

24-Hour Hang *In*: March 8, 2026

Since 2019, Alphabettes has spent nearly every International Women’s Day doing what it does best: hastily dis-organizing a 24-hour online hangout across timezones and continents with a loose schedule that anyone on the internet was welcome to join. We’d take a virtual type walk around Mumbai with Tanya. We’d join Romina and friends in Mexico City for an 8M March with handlettered signs from her community poster-making workshops. We’d hear cool conference stories from Theresa in San Francisco. We’d chit chat in Spanish for an hour with Laura and Dafne and Caro. We’d say hi to pets and babies and make breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, all at once. In 2026? Instead of hanging out, some of us decided we’re hanging in. Or maybe, hanging on. We’re still here, but for now, it’s ok to hang up the internet for the day or hang out in other ways. 

This International Women’s Day, I’ll be helping to bring a very hot soup to simmer. After two years of non-stop planning, writing, editing, organizing, emailing, type pairing, proofreading, and spreadsheeting, Alphabettes Soup: Feminist Approaches to Type, heads off to the printer very (very!) soon, after every tiny error has been uncovered in these 400 beautiful pages (🤞). Hang tight!

I could probably talk for twenty-four hours about each article (47!), interview (8!), typeface (115!), and header (252!) in the book. But not this year. I guess you’ll just have to read it yourself. Which reminds me: There’s still time to pre-order a copy (or two!) of Alphabettes Soup: Feminist Approaches to Type. It turns out, making really good books takes a lot of time, effort, and resources. We are so grateful to all of our generous sponsors and donors but we came up a bit short of our original financial goals. Pre-ordering this book directly supports independent, feminist design publishing and the work of women and gender diverse individuals in type. It also ensures you’ll have your very own copy to hang with for years to come. And that’s not a bad way to celebrate International Women’s Day. Hang in there 💚.

Tiny Grotesk: bridging 500 years of type design

Tiny Grotesk is a tiny superfamily. In a market where sans-serif families quickly grow to contain dozens of styles, sometimes over a hundred, Tiny Grotesk is an antidote, a proposal to do more with less. It covers as much ground as possible, across only twenty-four carefully selected styles.

Tiny Grotesk is in its regular width a clean, friendly neogrotesk with relaxed capitals and a round, even-keeled lowercase. The two accompanying widths, Narrow and Wide, expand it into a complex typographic toolkit. The Narrow styles, space-saving and optimised for small use, are ideal for footnotes, asides and UI elements. The Wide styles, imposing and optimised for large use, demand space, and will take that space no matter what. This pairing makes the family versatile and broadly usable while remaining as compact as possible.

Tiny Grotesk has been in development since 2019, slowly but steadily expanding in scope but not really in size. It has been used in a few print projects, on some vinyl records, and for a complex digital catalogue before its release in 2024 and expansion in 2026.

Bridging some 500 years of typographic ideas

The initial idea for the family started in a perhaps weird place: 1500s italic calligraphy and movable typefaces based on it. In these early days, the lowercase was a cursive italic. The capitals, however, were upright forms. Since the capital letters in these texts occurred relatively rarely – an average of something like once every forty characters – their presence clearly wasn’t disruptive to readers. Not disruptive enough to feel the need to draw italic capitals, which would require a whole new set of sorts to be drawn, cut and cast. I can’t blame them for wanting to be efficient.

The italics by Ludovico Arrighi were the original inspiration for Tiny Grotesk, in a direct but not entirely obvious way. The proportions were taken from his second italic, and I wanted to explore them in depth. Would the typographic rhythm work in a sans-serif jacket, even with the strange width relationship between these capitals and lowercase letters?

Continue reading

Looking Back and Ahead(er): Goodbye 2025, Hello 2026!

Let’s enjoy a look back at the headers featured here on Alphabettes.org in 2025:

Hespera (wip) typeface by Muk Monsalve — January 1 · @mukmonsalve
Typeface Don’t (wip) by Raven Mo — January 15 · @ravenmodesign
Thai, Crushual Italic by Boom Promphan S. · @boom.type
Arabic F37 Morta by Shaqa Bovand — February 15 · @shaqabovand
Georgian by Ana Sanikidze — March 1 · @wickedletters
Lettering by Brooke Hull — March 15 · @brookehull_designs
Aksan by Yaprak Buse Çağlar — April 1 @typolea
Rubina Typeface by Lora Shtirkova — April 15 · @loraincolors
Devanagari (WIP) by Lipi Raval — May 1 · @lipi.xyz
Hangul (WIP) by Joohee Lee — May 15 · @jooo.h
CMM Coda by Anna Cairns — June 1 · @a____cairns
Sumprat by Anne-Dauphine Borione (Daytona Mess) — June 15 · @daytonamess.otf
Palestine Still Bleeds — “Alphabettes” in Arabic by Omaima Dajani — July 1 · @omaima_dajani
Gustine Extra by Natalie Rauch — July 15 · @natalierauch
Vietnamese by Đông Trúc — August 1 · @do_ngtruc
Betania Patmos by Carolina Giovagnoli — August 15 · @laranadg
Party lettering by Carine Vadet-Perrot — September 1 · @carinevadetperrot
For the Flowers Crushed with Bombs — Alphabettes in Arabic by Maryam Golpayegani — September 15 · @golpayegani.maryam
Loew Next Devanagari by Amélie Bonet — October 1 · @ameacute
Vietnamese lettering by Xindha Yaeger — October 18 · @designedbyxin
Shariit by Nada Abdallah — November 1 · @nadabdalla
Mabuhay Display by Clara Cayosa — November 15 · @clarasees
Epitafio (in progress) by Mónica Rodiño — December 1 · @mrodinho

All past headers are archived here.

Thank you to Muk Monsalve & Amy Papaelias for keeping the headers flowing all year long. And endless thanks to our community and to all the incredible designers who shared their work with us this year.


Coming up real soon — Alphabettes Soup: Feminist Approaches to Type, our book that also features the 10-year archive of headers (Sept 2015–Nov 2025). To be published with Bikini Books in March 2026. Pre-order now!

Want to submit a header in 2026?

We warmly welcome submissions of type and lettering in all scripts, translations, and transliterations for the Alphabettes header. In-progress work, new releases, old things you found in your Desktop > DesktopGarbage > desktop folder.
Reach out via our contact page. 


Cheers!