We feel understood by people who work in games. Because the talented team at Double Fine spend their time making custom assets to immerse the player further into the experience of their games, they understood the value of custom fonts right off the bat. Double Fine’s message to us was loud and clear: we know that people make fonts, this game needs fonts, and this is why. That left most of the process to the ‘how’ question, and we got straight to work figuring that out.

Our early meetings were led by art director Lisette Titre-Montgomery, and designer Seth Forester, who shared the look and feel of the game with us, and walked us through some placeholder fonts they had been using during development. We loved hearing about their perspective on the visuals, and learning about what each font was meant to do in context. Whereas the reasoning for many custom typefaces is something like ‘it has to be legible in this context’ or ‘we want this to represent our brand,’ the brief for these fonts was largely based in narrative. The characters and plot points within the game gave reason for these fonts.

We were given access to the concept art that existed at that time, and we had a blast poring over that and imagining how this inspiration could translate to typography. Many of the mood boards were based on 1970’s patterns and geometry, with photos of architecture and furniture. The concept illustration amplified those ideas, creating a stylized tone that permeated through the architecture and prop designs. One day while we were waiting for a video meeting to begin, producer Malena Annable described the aesthetic to me in such a perfect way: “Nothing in the world of Psychonauts is at right angles. Everything is slightly skewed.”

For Chia, the typeface intended (for instance) for the notebooks of the game’s lead character, Danelle Cheney researched print handwriting exemplars. We knew these fonts had to be grounded in something systematic, and stay legible, but they also had to feel like they were drawn by someone, that they had heart. Knowing the Chia fonts could be used in dialogue put a distinctive ‘functional’ spin on the brief, but we also knew how important the ‘wonky’ aesthetics would be to the result. Print handwriting was a great place to begin because it is traditional, familiar, and structured, but it is also something that feels naive and human, rather than mechanical and perfect.

It seemed fitting that the Chia fonts have a sort of a ‘pen’ quality to them, which implied rounded ball-point-like endings to strokes. We have previously observed something called the ‘dogbone effect,’ where literally rounded strokes seem to swell in weight as they terminate. To avoid this, Danelle came up with a very clever solution: ‘domed’ endings that were neither fully round or fully straight. A balance between function and character.

I had drafted a fairly straightforward geometric sans as a basis for the design, but we immediately began implementing construction choices that were warmer and more hand-made. Danelle’s drawings of the ‘v’ and ‘w’ are great examples, with their strokes that bow slightly, rather than being comprised of straight lines. Glyphs like ‘x’ and ‘k’ had terminations that aligned to the direction of the stroke, rather than to the baseline or x-height, which made them feel more animated and alive.

I drew a sketch of systematic ‘overhangs’ for the cap drawings, that were reminiscent of the kind of handwriting detail that feels very human: humans are not super good at making two strokes line up exactly. Danelle implemented this idea into the cap drawings, and they started feeling more human, unique, and charming. All of these decisions were giving us a basic structure for Chia that was simultaneously systematic and energetic.

We found the direction for Savannah largely by looking at the fonts for the original Psychonauts game released in 2005 (the first game had fonts desinged by Scott Campbell and Nathan 'Bagel' Stapley). Most letterforms have a basis in what I will call ‘pen logic,’ a way that the letterforms are constructed from individual pen strokes. So influential is the pen, in this way, that when ‘pen logic’ is broken, we see it very clearly as ‘wonky.’ The original fonts had this quality to them, take this capital ‘E’ for example. The main ‘spine’ of the ‘E’ is not one solid stroke, as we might expect it to be. Instead the negative shapes ‘cut into’ it, more like a potato print or a linocut. It seemed like the letters had been drafted in a way where positive and negative shapes were made independently, rather than at once via the strokes of a pen. With this in mind, I started working on a software tool that would allow us to draw Savannah this way.

I imagined that our Savannah letters were going to be made from construction paper, with the positive and negative shapes each cut individually with scissors. And shortly after we had carefully arranged the pieces on a table top, a slight breeze would have come in the window and disturbed all of these little pieces of paper ever so slightly. So I built a software tool that we nicknamed The Wonkerator™. The Wonkerator is our ‘digital breeze’ (if you will), taking our carefully assembled positive and negative shapes and scattering them in very careful ways. Each piece was permitted to move up and down, left and right, rotate, change in size slightly, etc.

Danelle Cheney drew a solid base design for Savannah, and with the help of this new software, we watched an energetic linocut-like, construction-paper-esque typeface full of heart and spontaneity emerge. From a systematic process came an a-systematic result, and Savannah suddenly felt like it belonged in this game. The talented designers and art directors at Double Fine felt the same way, and this exploration was refined into the Savannah fonts you can now see in-game.

Danelle’s narrower proportion drawings for Savannah allow the typeface to take up less space on screen, and therefore appear at a larger point size more often. This comes in handy for things like subtitles and UI elements. Danelle’s drawings for Savannah follow largely traditional constructions (knowing that the software would push all of the drawings to a more aesthetically wonky place), but she added a few departures that I really love; the unusual construction of the uppercase ‘Y’ is a great example.

Similarly we began adding a range of weight to both Savannah and Chia. It was a wonderful challenge to both change the weight of these designs, AND keep the right amount of ‘wonk’ in each. In both Chia and Savannah, the wonkiness is distributed uniquely to each weight in the family. So if a letter ‘e’ leans left in Chia Regular, it may lean the other way in another weight. Rather than treating these details consistently, we let the custom software make them more ‘realistic’ and more perfectly imperfect. What otherwise would be an insurmountable amount of manual ‘wonky’ drawing, became rather swift.

Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine, sent some aesthetic feedback at one point, that Lisette, Seth, and Malena relayed to us: please add more wonk. And whereas if we had just drawn the wonkiness manually, we’d have to then redo all of our work, our custom software tools on this project allowed us to achieve a new result by changing some parameters and re-wonkerating everything. In this way, our working method had aligned with the practical reality of making complicated projects, and we were able to make aesthetic adjustments late in the process that did not require a delay in delivery, which is something I am quite proud of.

This same flexibility allowed us to make versions of the fonts specifically for accessibility settings in the game. Accessibility is something that Lettermatic and Double Fine both take seriously, and so Psychonauts 2 includes an accessibility setting that switches to a ‘low wonk’ version of these custom fonts, improving legibility for captioning and elsewhere by making the letters less lean-y, less bounce-y, and less taper-y. For this version, we added a new lowercase ‘a’ and ‘g’ (with double-story drawings by Danelle) because these constructions are often seen as more legible in context.

Rather than switching to a different typeface entirely, and suggesting that accessibility should come at the cost of aesthetics, this solution allows the game to provide more accessible visuals, while keeping the typography aesthetically styled. This, too, is something I am very proud of.