I drew Separator in 2012 after watching the Prometheus trailers on a loop. Not the film, the trailers. The title work in them was cold and clinical and I wanted to know what would happen if I took every curve out of an alphabet. No bowls, no shoulders, no soft joins. Straight lines meeting at angles and nothing else.
What curve-free letterforms actually do
Curves are what make letters look handmade. The bowl of a b or a p still carries the movement of a pen through it, even when the thing was drawn on a screen. Take the curves away and that goes with them. What's left reads as plotted rather than written.
The round letters take the worst of it. O, S, C and G all end up as polygons. At poster size the whole alphabet goes cold and slightly synthetic, which is the register sci-fi title work has wanted since Kubrick. Nothing to do with chrome or gradients. It just doesn't look like a hand made it.
The second thing is less obvious. Flat sides sit against each other very evenly, so a word in Separator locks up into one solid block. Useful for a one-word title. Awful for a paragraph, as you'd expect.
Where to use Separator font
- Film and game posters. The title is the biggest thing on the sheet and has to read from across a road.
- Title cards and motion graphics — trailer titles, lower thirds, fake interface text.
- Wayfinding. Flat sides survive large-format vinyl better than you'd think.
- Album art and merch, where one word has to carry the sleeve.
- Book and magazine covers. Sci-fi titles obviously, but also anything about AI, which is now most things.
It won't do body copy and it won't carry a brand on its own. 299 glyphs, Basic Latin, kerning and nothing else — no alternates, no stylistic sets. One job.
Setting it
Track it open. The letters already lock together, so anything tight turns a word into a brick. Go looser than feels right, especially in caps.
Pair it with something dull. Helvetica, Univers, whatever your studio defaults to. If the second font has opinions the two will fight and the poster ends up busy instead of cold.
Leave the effects alone. Chrome, glow, scanlines, lens flare — all of it drags the thing back to 1985. If it only works with an effect on it, the layout isn't finished yet. I went on about this at more length in five alternative and minimal movie poster designs.
Print it. Type judged at 30% on a screen will lie to you. Stick a section up at full size and walk away from it. The joins hold at distance. The spacing usually doesn't.
The android bit
What I didn't expect was the font ageing into its own subject. It came out of a film about an android who does human very convincingly and isn't one, and the same trick is sitting in the letters. Every character is technically correct. All of them are legible. Something is off and you can't put a finger on what.
Fourteen years ago that was a film idea. Now it's a Tuesday.
Short version
Use it when the title is the idea. Big, spaced, something plain underneath, then stop. Fonts like this go wrong when you keep going.
View Separator — £15, OTF, Mac and Windows.
Written by Simon Stratford, type designer and graphic designer. These are my opinions, reached after too little sleep and too much coffee. You can also follow my antics on @itsmesimonok, or leave a comment below. Despite all the opinions, I’m actually quite nice.