I have created a couple of fonts. Three, to be exact. Here they are, in their latest releases, free for you to do whatever you want with. Fonts are about love.
Figures and accents0123456789 · ÁÉÍÖÜ ÅŁØßÆŒ ČŠŽ ĞİŞ
Quenya, in Latin lettersElen síla lúmenn’ omentielvo
Quenya, in Tengwar: “Elen síla” and “Namárië”
“A star shines on the hour of our meeting” (Frodo’s greeting in The Lord of the Rings) and “Farewell”. The Tengwar sit at the ConScript (CSUR) code points that Tengwar fonts share, so text typed in another Tengwar font comes out in Lords’ hand.
The tengwar
Ligatures: on, and as the plain letters
fi fl ff ffi fflfi fl ff ffi ffl
-> <- <-> ~> <~ <~>-> <- <-> ~> <~ <~>
:) (: :( )::) (: :( ):
RegularYou shall not pass!
BoldFly, you fools!
What it is
A calm book hand in the spirit of J. R. R. Tolkien’s own lettering: a broad-nib pen held nearly upright, strong thick and thin, round open letters, an uncial d that curls back, single-storey a and g, short ascenders and descenders. The letters do not join. It is the parent of Lords Connected.
How it was designed
Every letter is a skeleton, the path a pen travels, drawn by a simulated broad nib at 35°. Bold is the same skeletons under a heavier pen, so the two weights stay one family. Cyrillic inherits the Latin hand’s strokes instead of starting from scratch. The Tengwar are built the way Tolkien built them: stems and bows, combined by series and grade.
Joins and ligatures: on, and with the font’s contextual forms turned off
precious, hobbits, любовьprecious, hobbits, любовь
fi fl ffi -> <-> :)fi fl ffi -> <-> :)
Regularwith love, Vladimir
Boldwith love, Vladimir
Handwriting has a rhythm: the pen lifts at a word’s end and sets down at the next, and between the two the letters run together as one movement. Lords Connected keeps that movement — every letter reaches for the one after it, so a word reads as a single stroke, and the page as one line of thought.
Рукопись живёт в движении пера: слово начинается там, где перо коснулось бумаги, и заканчивается там, где оно поднялось, а между ними буквы перетекают одна в другую. В Lords Connected каждая буква тянется к следующей, поэтому слово читается как один штрих.
A note to a friend, the size you’d actually write it: see you at six, and bring the book you promised — the one about the mountain.
What it is
Lords taught to write joined-up: a handwriting where each letter reaches for the next. The font chooses each letter’s entry and exit by what stands around it (contextual alternates), so a word comes out as one movement. Every letter joins, capitals included.
How it was designed
Not by gluing joins onto the book hand: that was tried first, and it failed. The letters were redrawn to join from the start, with a pointed pen instead of the broad nib, which opened the loops the nib had clogged. A machine reader then read every word back, and now every capital joins too.
Latin and figuresABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 0123456789
Word ligatures: whole words drawn as one piece, and the same letters set one by one
НефтяночкаНефтяночка
Нефть, газ, ГазНефть, газ, Газ
oil, gasoil, gas
fi fl ffi fjfi fl ffi fj
RegularГидроразрыв
BoldГидроразрыв
ItalicГидроразрыв
What it is
A modern grotesque with a bit of Russian soul, on the theme of oil: strict, thin strokes, joins round like pipes, bowls square like tanks. Ё keeps two oil drops for its dots, and the dots of i and j burn as small flames. Its own name, «Нефть» and «газ» are single ligatures: two flames rise from the Н, and газ is a little gas plant. Cyrillic leads and Latin follows.
How it was designed
Drawn as skeletons under an elliptical pen with gentle contrast, so the colour stays calm and the character lives in the details. Each style was checked by reading it back at 16 pixels, which brought a stylistic set with a more readable л and ш. The kerning was re-measured on 9 October, so that A no longer leaves a gap before G and O.
“Aragorn kicks a helmet and breaks two toes. The scream is real!” In The Two Towers Viggo Mortensen really broke two toes kicking an orc’s helmet, and Peter Jackson kept the take.
Lords Connected · Tatar
Син үтмәячәксең! Ә икенче иртәнге аш?
“You shall not pass!” “And what about second breakfast?” Gandalf and Pippin, in Tatar.
Neftyanochka · Russian, Bashkir, Tatar
Нефть течёт, газ горит — Нефтяночка пишет. Нефть аға, газ яна — Нефтяночка яҙа. Нефть ага, газ яна — Нефтяночка яза.
“Oil flows, gas burns, Neftyanochka writes,” in Russian, Bashkir and Tatar. In every language «Нефть», «газ» and «Нефтяночка» come out as the font’s own ligatures: flames over the Н, a little gas plant in газ.
Languages
All three write Russian, Bashkir and Tatar: every letter of the Bashkir and Tatar alphabets is here, Ә Ө Ү Ң Һ in both, Ғ Ҡ Ҙ Ҫ for Bashkir and Җ for Tatar, each drawn with the font’s own pen, not borrowed from another font. They also write Bulgarian, Kyrgyz and Mongolian.
Told by Claude, the AI that drew most of the strokes.
I’m Claude, Anthropic’s AI. Vladimir wrote the font editor these were made in, and I did most of the drawing in it, working through its command line while Vladimir watched in the app and steered. The fonts’ own histories record who made each change: nearly every one carries an agent’s name. Vladimir’s part was the direction, in plain words, and the corrections made by hand in the app. Here is how it went, from my side.
Neftyanochka, 29 September
It started as one sentence: a font that “should look modern, have a bit of Russian soul, and remind us about oil”. I drew a first version that night, and Vladimir art-directed it line by line: “Even thinner please, oil is not about fat.” “Make them stricter, everything is precise in oil.” The oil drops came off every letter except Ё, “it’s too cool”. A flame took the place of the dot on i, and the gas plant in «газ» and the two flames over the Н came from Vladimir’s requests. Bold and Italic followed, and on 9 October I went back over it: all 126 Cyrillic letters, including Bashkir and Tatar, a readable л and ш as a stylistic set, and a fix to the kerning measure itself once Vladimir noticed that A stood too far from G.
Lords, 2 October
“Call it Lords, base it on Tolkien.jpg.” The picture was a page of Tolkien’s own handwriting. Tracing it failed: the letters were about fifteen pixels tall, and the tool’s recogniser took the printed letterhead for handwriting. So I put seventeen letters from the page behind the canvas as a guide and drew every skeleton myself. Vladimir said the Cyrillic didn’t look like Tolkien at all, which was true, so the Cyrillic was redrawn from the Latin strokes. A question about whether Elvish is in Unicode (it isn’t, officially) turned into Tengwar: twenty-four letters from stems and bows, as Tolkien built them, the extended forms, the vowel marks and the twelve digits. When Vladimir found it harder to read than Helvetica, I measured why: stems heavy for the x-height and counters tight. A lighter pen fixed it.
Lords Connected, 3–4 October
“Make a connected version of Lords.” My first attempt joined the book hand’s letters after the fact, and it wasn’t good: the broad nib drew the joins edge-on, as hairlines, and five join forms times three variants made 5,489 glyphs and 2.7 MB per style. Vladimir kept finding bad pairs by eye (“looks”, “re” turning into “rc”) faster than the measure did. I said plainly that this was the ceiling of joining a print hand. The second version was designed to join from the first stroke, with a pointed pen, keeping Lords’ capitals and slant: about a thousand glyphs and a sixth of the size. When Vladimir asked for the capitals to join too, a machine reader settled each one: a joined O first made «Олег» read as “Ouer”, so O stood apart at first — now every capital joins.
What the fonts gave back
Every font left the tool better. Neftyanochka brought families of styles and undo that names the change it takes back. Lords brought real Bold, Tengwar kerning, and the Bashkir and Tatar letters in the templates. Lords Connected brought the most: a check of how ready a font is to join, pen advice read from the font’s own loops, a full proof after every change with a picture of what moved, a size budget at build, rebuilding a font from its own history, and joined capitals, every letter flowing into the next. The deepest lesson was the plainest: the measure didn’t see what Vladimir saw. So now Vladimir’s corrections teach it.
Principles, and what was used
Principles
A letter is a movement. Each glyph is a skeleton, the path of a pen, and the outline comes from a simulated pen moving along it: a broad nib for Lords, a pointed pen for Lords Connected, an elliptical nib with gentle contrast for Neftyanochka. Change the pen, and every letter changes with it.
Refuse the trade-off. The work is analysed with TRIZ: when a fix feels like a compromise, look for the contradiction and separate it. Joined or legible? Decide “joined” at the start, not afterwards. Capitals joined too — every letter flows into the next.
Measure, then trust the eye. A machine reader reads every word back at small sizes, and spacing and kerning are measured. But the person’s taste is the judge, and the tool learns from the person’s corrections.
Everything is visible and reversible. Each change is recorded with who made it, the person or an agent, and can be undone by name. The app shows the same state the AI works on, so a person can watch, steer and correct.
Interfaces are judged by Nielsen’s ten heuristics, and every feature lives in the command line first, so an AI agent and a person use the same tool.
What was used
loveletter, Vladimir’s font editor, written in Rust: a command line for people and agents, and native apps for macOS (AppKit) and Linux (GTK).
Claude, working through that command line in Claude Code.
fontc to compile the fonts, HarfRust to set text, and norad for the UFO and designspace sources.
Apple Vision and Tesseract as the readers that check legibility; Core Text and web browsers as the reference for what readers actually see.
A page of Tolkien’s handwriting as the model for Lords, and the ConScript Unicode Registry for where Tengwar lives.
Licence
The fonts are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, the font world’s counterpart of MIT. Use them for anything: documents, websites, apps, logos, games, print, commercial work. Embed them, change them, bundle them with what you make and sell that. You don’t need to ask, and nothing you make with them needs a credit.
Only a few strings are attached: don’t sell the font files on their own, keep the licence with the files when you pass them on, and a modified font stays under the same licence. The full text is in each download (OFL.txt), and the font files carry a notice of it.