For more than ten years there was a calendar block on my phone that said MAKE FONT. All caps. Recurring. Set to “free,” which is calendar-speak for this will not happen today either. I started three times. Maybe four. A sketchbook of lowercase a’s here, a half-drawn alphabet there, a folder called font_final_v2 that I’m not going to open in front of you. Every start died the same way: I got the letters I loved and then met the four hundred glyphs I didn’t, and I went back to my actual job.
My actual job, for fifteen years, has been building software for people who don’t have time for bad software. Nurses studying at 11pm. Doctors trying to learn a procedure between patients. Clinical trials that live or die on a form. That work teaches you one thing above everything else: nobody is going to admire your interface. They’re going to read it, fast, tired, on a phone, and either understand or not. Typography isn’t decoration in that world. It’s the whole product wearing a disguise.
So I always knew what I wanted. Not a display face, not a logo with pretensions. A text face. Something you could set a paragraph in at sixteen pixels and forget about, and then blow up to 200 pixels and go, oh. Oh, that’s got a personality.
Where the taste comes from
I grew up in Parsippany, New Jersey, which is to say I grew up reading highway signs, and then in Morehead City, North Carolina, which is to say I grew up reading the sides of boats. Both taught me the same lesson: letters that have to work outdoors, at speed, for strangers, are the honest ones. Geometric bones. Big x-height. No tricks.
Then came the fonts I actually fell for. Gotham’s confidence. Avenir’s quiet intelligence, the way it looks mathematical and isn’t. Montserrat, which taught a whole generation of us what a free font could be. And the rounded ones, which I loved and didn’t trust, because most rounded fonts are just regular fonts that got a little too friendly at the party.
The thing I wanted didn’t exist: a geometric grotesk with the softness applied like an engineer would apply it. On purpose. In specific places. With a rule.
Rounded by rule, not by default
That became the whole design. Vigil rounds most at the exposed terminals, the ends of the C and S and the arms of the E, where a stroke stops and the eye lands. It rounds less at the structural corners. It doesn’t round the punctuation at all, because a period should still be a period.
Soften where you meet people. Stay square where the structure needs you. Don’t blur the periods.
I have come to believe this is also a decent way to live.
Why it finally shipped
Two things changed.
The first is that in June I climbed the height of Everest on a ski hill in Utah over 36 hours, one lap at a time, because I’d signed up for it and the date came. I had also, at some point before that, run a marathon for the same reason. The lesson was not inspiring. It was procedural. Things get finished when the finish line is on the calendar as a fact instead of a wish.
The second is that I stopped pretending a font has to be born from nothing. Every typeface is a fork of the alphabet. Vigil is built on Figtree, Erik Kennedy’s open-source geometric sans, under a license that exists precisely so people like me can take a great skeleton and give it a different body. I didn’t draw every curve from scratch. I decided what every curve should be, which turns out to be the part I’d been avoiding for ten years. The rest is code, patience, and a lot of squinting at the letter K.
It shipped on September 4, 2026. Eight weights, italics, an outline for when you want to shout, and a variable axis that goes from whisper to wall. It is free. It will always be free. No email, no account, no “just tell us where you work.” Download the zip.
What Vigil means
It’s my name, sure. But the word came first. A vigil is staying awake through the long stretch when nothing is happening yet, because you’ve decided something will.
Ten years is a long vigil. Turns out you can keep one and still finish.
Now go set something in it.
— Keno Vigil, Cary, North Carolina