How to spot the Rotis font in the wild
Part 7 in my series on building an online archive to celebrate the Rotis font
I’m often asked how on earth I’m able to tell that some text is set in the Rotis font.
Today, I’ll show you how!
The best place to start is with the ‘e’ and ‘a’ characters. These are dead giveaways once you know what to look for.
To avoid confusion, I’m going to eschew the complex typography terminology and keep it really simple.
In the visual above, I’ve put the glyph for the ‘a’ and ‘e’ characters from the Helvetica and Rotis fonts next to each other (ok, a teeny bit of typography terminology; ‘glyph’ is the word used to denote a character ‘dressed’ in a specific font. It’s the same character; it just looks a bit different in each font).
As the annotations show, there are two attributes to look for:
Stroke Thickness: notice how the width, or stroke, of the letterform varies significantly throughout the Rotis glyph vs the Helvetica glyph. I always think it makes the ‘e’ look really enthusiastic.
Negative Space: notice the big difference in size between the two ‘areas’ enclosed by the shape of the Rotis glyph vs the Helvetica glyph. I always think it makes the ‘a’ look very surprised (yes, you’re quite right, I do have a habit of personifying fonts)
To extend this principle, you can see this pattern repeating across all four Rotis font families. It’s definitely least pronounced in the Rotis Sans family on the far left of the visual, and most noticeable in the Semi Sans and Semi Serif families in the middle.
So there you go! That’s a starting point for spotting the Rotis font in the wild. Not too long from now you’ll be spotting it all over the place.
And when you do, please snap a photo and send it my way so I can include it in the archive 🤩
Very well explained. I like your description of the e "enthusiastic" and the a "surprised". I can see this!