ONE WEIGHT · 68 GLYPHS
VERSION 1.000 · UPM 1000 A STRANGE ORGANIC FACE
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A display typeface assembled from looping centerlines, bulbous endpoints
and scattered dot accents. Every glyph is a small piece of botanical
notation; nothing is straight if it can be persuaded to wander.
vines
Vermicula takes its name from the Latin diminutive of vermes — little worms, little vines, little curling things. Each letter is built from a stroke that wanders: a stem swirls into a terminal curl, an almond body holds a floating dot at its center, a diagonal arm ends in a bulb.
The geometry follows a simple grammar. Centerline paths — spirals, arcs, beziers, and gently wobbled lines — are buffered into ribbons of uniform weight, then unioned together. Where two paths end without joining, a small spiral is added. Where there is empty space inside a body, a dot is placed. The result has the cadence of a hand-drawn manuscript without the inconsistency of a hand.
It is meant for display: a chapter heading, a label on a botanical plate, the front of an envelope no one expects.
Morphological taxonomy
A O Q
Almond and oval bodies — closed forms with internal dots
D H I L
Vine stems — vertical strokes terminating in spiral curls
B P R
Bowl-and-stem — a closed loop appended to a vertical
C G S
Open arcs — partial circles with bulbous endpoints
M N
Arched humps — multi-stem letters with stitched arches
K V W X Y Z
Diagonals — straight or wobbled, finished with bulbs
E F T
Combs — stems with crossbars, each crossbar curled at its tip
The garden, like a manuscript, can be read by anyone patient
Curling tendrils mark each terminal, and a small dot floats inside every closed body
Designed for display use — chapter openings, broadsides, book covers and curiosities. The shapes hold together at body-text sizes but they are not asking to be read in long passages.
Vermicula was generated procedurally from centerline paths: spirals, elliptical arcs, bezier curves and gently wobbled lines, buffered to a uniform stroke and unioned into single per-glyph polygons; floating dot accents are then scattered into each glyph's negative space.
“Nothing is straight if it can be persuaded to wander.”
— design note for Vermicula
I / l / 1 — and O / 0 — disambiguation
I
Uppercase I (stem + two curls)
l
Lowercase l (ascender, curl ends)
1
Digit 1 (stem + base foot)
O
Letter O (oval + center dot)
0
Digit 0 (oval + diagonal slash)
Quantitative profile
Cap height
70.0%
target 65–75% in range
x-height
48.0%
target 45–55% (display) in range
x / cap ratio
68.6%
target 60–75% in range
Avg points / cap glyph
577
baroque — typical sans ≈ 60–120
Avg contours / cap glyph
5.2
multiple strokes per letter
Mapped codepoints
68
A–Z, a–z, 0–9, .,!?-, space
File size
65.2 KB
single TTF, no hinting
UPM
1000
standard TrueType grid
Specimen text
The garden in the codex was hand-illustrated by an anonymous monk in
the late fourteenth century. The text running alongside it — what we
now call Vermicula — was never translated, because it was never written
in any known language. The shapes are recognizable, almost Latin, but
each letter swirls into a terminal curl, each closed bowl holds a
single floating dot, each stem finishes in a small bulb. Whoever drew
them was patient. They drew the shapes the plants in the garden made
when they could no longer keep still: roots looping over themselves,
tendrils searching for purchase, seedheads bursting in slow motion.
Whether anyone could read it then is unknown. We cannot read it now.
But it can be set, and it can be printed, and it can be looked at.