Zodiac Killer Font, Pt. II
Another day, another font. This time it’s another style written by the Cipher Killer Zodiac, when he was a little more same and rational when writing letters. That’s why it’s called Zanity. And I started out with OpenType and custom ligatures for all of you font buffs out there.
The Font
First, please see the character chart of the available characters in this font. More than the last time.
All cyan marked characters are hand drawn by me because I couldn’t find a good representation of it in any of the Zodiac’s letters. So I had to draw them in his style from what I knew. I just hope that this won’t bother Bob Graysmith 1. I did study all of Zodiac’s letters and ways of writing similar glyphs so I hope they blend in well with the rest of the font.
When dealing with scripts and handwritings in terms of font creation there are some things you want to avoid as a font designer such as repeating characters in double consonants, that’s why I added some self-made ligatures for the following cases:
- Because Zodiac started many of his letters by “This is the Zodiac speaking” the Th is very important. And it is a ligature. Also in my font
- ee, ff, ll, mm, nn, oo, oo, rr, ss, tt and zz but also // look silly when they consist of two exact glyphs, that’s why I added variations.
- Further there are ligatures for ra and af, just stumbled across them.
- Two common words are also a single glyph: of and is.
- You might want use the font for printing also email addresses or links, that’s why I’ve added an @, // and http as single glyphs for a better impression
- Type (+) for the Zodiac logo.
That’s why I chose OpenType rather than TrueType in the first place.
An Example
Or click the thumbnail icon to this post on the top of the page for a comparison.
Donation & Download
The font is donation ware. So if you want to say a little “thanks” by donating money that would be really nice. Thank in advance!
 the Zanity OpenType Font |
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This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Austria License.
- …who wrote Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked. Very good reads! ↩
Comments
derek (Apr 28, 2009)
Hi, just downloaded Zodiac and saved it automatically somewhere!. How do I use it? I opened a windows office word 2003 new doc but the font did not show up on the list. I am a bit of a ludite about these things.
Can you help.
PS to ease things I gave a donation. If I can get this working, I think I will buy the other two zodiac fonts and donate twice.
Help!
Please
Derek
Francisco (May 22, 2009)
Hey, I downloaded the Zanity font, and I thought it was really cool that it included the logo, but…I have NO idea how to type it. Could you clarify how I make the logo appear? Thank you.
Phil Strahl (May 22, 2009)
Hi Francisco!
obviously you didn’t read my blog post because it’s in there: “Type (+) for the Zodiac logo.” So left parenthesis, plus-sign and right parenthesis. You need to have open type features enabled for this.
Deke (May 18, 2011)
The logo doesn’t show up… Typing “(+)” with the font only results in seeing… (+)
Phil Strahl (May 18, 2011)
Be sure you try this in a program that supports OpenType functions (like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign), otherwise this and other ligature-compounds unfortunately won’t work.