Phiz is a diverse suite of 27 decorative fonts all based on Shinntype’s Figgins Sans Extra Bold.

There are four sub-families: Classic (9 fonts), Rounded (7 fonts), Rough (4 fonts) and Particles (7 fonts).

While the Classic styles hark back to the 19th century and the Rounded and Rough styles are thoroughly modern, the Particles styles emanate from the future. These irregular type designs occupy a unique niche—neither casual and hand-drawn, nor imitating distressed printing (e.g. the “rusty” look). They were conceived and executed as complex algorithmically-generated graphic procedures, in which repetitive elements were artfully applied to the Sans capitals and manually nuanced. As such they also differ substantially from textured glyph shapes that have been cut out from larger pattern fields, for the constituent particles are disposed in relation to the specific shape of each character they define.

The caps-with-small-caps format was chosen for two reasons. Firstly, titling display usage is predominantly capitals, and secondly, rather like optical scaling, having the same resolution of texture available in two different “sizes” (upper and lower case) should prove useful in the hierarchy of page layout—not primarily for setting upper and lower case text as caps-with-small-capitals, although this is of course an option. Figures and major symbols (punctuation and currency) are provided in both cap and small cap height.

All Phiz fonts have the same metrics and kerning, facilitating layering.