Tilt is a family of three variable fonts, based on styles of dimensional lettering that you might find in a storefront. It was designed by Andy Clymer in 2019.

Inspiration for the design came from one completely average neon sign, spotted in the front window of a laundromat in New York City. The sign revealed something that should have been completely obvious but that I hadn’t ever noticed.

Neon signs are of course built to be viewed straight-on, from this angle the shape of their characters and symbols match as closely as possible to the model that the sign-maker is following. We take it as a general understanding that when viewed off-center, the sign exposes the twisted path that the neon tubes had to take to form the intended image. A good sign-maker would try to minimize this distortion, ideally the sign would at least pass as being readable from any angle.

However, this particular sign, at 188 3rd Ave., seemed different. From the front it looked completely static, like any ordinary sans-serif. However, the side form of the digits looked fast and dynamic, and almost hand written. I saw something that looked like it was more than just distorted neon tubing, a new letterform that could have been made intentionally (even though it surely was not).

With variable fonts on the mind, I thought it was kind of amazing how the physical form of a common sans-serif could inadvertently blend into something that looked like graffiti lettering.

I sent a quick snap of the sign to a few friends, “can your #varfont do this?”, and kept moving, but I couldn’t ignore it — from a technological standpoint I had to figure out how exactly a variable font could do this. It took most of 2019, and along with a lot of custom tooling in RoboFont to be able to draw in the third dimension, I wound up with Tilt.

To design the typeface, I put myself in the shoes of the sign-maker and started by drawing the letter model of a geometric sans serif, with the intention that it would only be used as a guide to build up the neon letterforms. It’s a familiar style, and one that’s easy to find in lettering manuals — variations have been taught as part of the sign-making trade for decades. The actual neon sign that inspired the design looks like it may have started from Helvetica, but I wanted to imagine that the Neon style of Tilt was first brush-lettered as a reference for the final neon sign, and wasn’t related to any single typeface in particular.

Aside from the Tilt Neon style, now that I had drawn a full sans-serif to use as a guide, I ended up finding two more 3D forms that I could get out of the same model. Like the Neon, these two other styles are based on dimensional letters you might find on a storefront, but are styles that also show up in other places in type and lettering history.

Tilt Prism references the lettering that you might find vacuum-formed in plastic on a theater marquee, or cast in bronze at the entrance to a bank. At the same time, it’s also related to the prismatic forms that were so common to find in 18th-century wood type and sign-painting manuals.

Tilt Warp takes a different approach, now that the classic sign-making techniques of bending neon and hand lettering are disappearing from modern storefronts, being replaced by quick and cheap vinyl sticker lettering. While it’s intended to be a flat reproduction style, the peeling stickers take a three-dimensional form of their own. Once again, the lettering artists long before our own time envisioned this trend and had cut their own examples of warped letters.

With the advent of the variable font format, I like to think that a designer is freed from the traditional layout of a family of type. Tilt doesn’t give a designer variable control over the parameters you might expect — such as weight and width — but instead lets you dial in the “Horizontal Rotation” (HROT) and “Vertical Rotation” (VROT) of the tilting letterforms. In place of a range of weights, the Neon style has been drawn to function as a Regular style in text, and Tilt Warp is heavy enough to work as a companion Bold when necessary.