I released Cornpile on August 19, 2016. It was commissioned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for a children’s book, which gave me the chance to work in a more playful register than I usually do. Cornpile is a slab serif with exaggerated, cartoon-like proportions. I drew it in six weights with matching italics, and I included both uppercase and lowercase. Even though the commission didn’t call for it, I expanded the character set to cover Greek and Cyrillic so that the family would be more versatile.

One of the features I built into Cornpile was a system of contextual alternates. Each letter has variations that automatically shuffle as you type, giving the text a bouncy, irregular rhythm that fits the intended children’s context. To construct the round parts of the letters, I avoided the rectilinear superelliptical shapes often seen in digital fonts. Instead, I experimented with three-point Bezier curves, which gave the forms a looser, hand-drawn quality when interpolated across weights. To make the font function properly, I eventually had to add points at the sides and top or bottom, but for a while I used a post-processing step to optimize the shapes without distortion.

That unconventional approach caused problems years later. In late 2022, Adobe chose Cornpile to feature in their early 2023 debut of variable fonts. When I began preparing the variable version, I discovered that my geometry didn’t conform to the requirements of the format. Over three and a half weeks, I rebuilt the family by moving Bezier control points across all the masters manually, using the originals as a guide. It was a laborious process, but it allowed Cornpile to work smoothly as a variable font.

Cornpile has not been updated since then. Apart from the original commission, I haven’t seen it used elsewhere, but it remains in my catalog as an example of how experimental methods can both expand possibilities and complicate future developments.