Collection: Jewelsmith

A naively-drawn vernacular serif, Jewelsmith draws from ceramic tiles manufactured by William De Morgan for G. F. Watts’ ‘Memorial To Heroic Self Sacrifice’ in Postman’s Park, St Martin’s Le Grand, London, and other similar inscriptions from around the same period. The baseline is jumpy, the stroke weights varied and not always placed in what might be traditionally considered the correct position, and the letter widths range from condensed to extended. These idiosyncrasies make for an evocative and unsettling typeface, forged from forgotten traditions and battered by the depredations of age. Ligatures are provided for common letter-pairs to avoid repeats, and setting can be further customised by choosing the upper or lowercase variants. Somewhere between folk-horror and fantasy, Jewelsmith is a fascinating historical quirk.