Why I made yet another condensed sans-serif.
It all started with the signs. The streets, the markets, the stretched tarps of Mexico City. Bold, crooked letters, badly edited, terribly vectorized — and yet, undeniably powerful. That “Impact with white outline ALL-CAPS” aesthetic is a fading art form, but still one of the most effective visual languages around. I wanted to make a font that captured that boldness and self-confidence — but made it work outside the meme context.
I wanted the message to remain more important than the form… but for the form to have its own voice. I wanted Impact, but better.
{{< posts_image_grid title=“A series of fortunate sketches” images=“images/Outpact1.png,images/Outpact2.png,images/Outpact3.png,images/Outpact4.png” >}}
At some point, Outpact and Tortilla Studio became the same project. The first time the site started to feel “real” was when I added an early beta of Outpact. It finally started to feel like it had its own personality.
That’s where one of the key ideas came from: duplexed widths.
Every weight of Outpact is exactly the same width. So you can dynamically switch between Light and Black and nothing moves — menus stay aligned, buttons stay the same width, layouts hold steady. It’s subtle, but in logos and UI design, it’s a dream.
Outpact is a sans because I wanted a family that was widely used and widely useful.
It’s relatively condensed, has multiple weights, and the system keeps legibility solid across the board. One interesting side effect of the duplexing: since the Black weight needs to fit in the same space as the Light, it gets compressed and simplified. That makes the Light feel even more spacious and perfect for text.
Some of the hardest design choices came from needing simple forms that work at all weights.
Letters like f, r, y, j — simplifying their terminals so they work in Black without becoming awkward took a long time.
Kerning
Kerning, in short, is adjusting pairs of letters that leave weird spaces between them. But what happens when you want to keep identical metrics across all weights?
You can’t kern the usual way.
If the “Ta” pair needs a bigger adjustment in Light than in Black, you’re stuck. You break the duplexing.
Temporary solution: suffer. Nah kidding. It has no kerning for now. I’m sorry… but honestly, look at it, it’s kinda ok without it!
- Future plan (maybe in Outpact++): a compound kerning system, where the kerning diff is distributed across both glyphs, keeping overall width constant. Using opentype positioning. Extremely nerdy. Incredibly fun to think about. 🥺
About the license
From day one, I wanted Outpact to have a license that felt simple, fair, and usable:
- Yes, you can use it for free, legally, for social media, your site, your project, your small business.
- You don’t need to pay, unless your project is commercial and you’ve got a team or business with more than 10 people.
- The paid license is super affordable, and every purchase helps me expand the family, add more language support, and work on other scripts.
Outpact is me saying: here’s my best work for free on the internet.
I want it everywhere. I hope people like it and support it.
Tortilla Studio believes in the liberation of ideas, in heavy anarchism, in mutual care. We read William Morris. We want to make accessible, beautiful fonts and also survive.
Outpact is a small rebellion in a font market that’s consolidated and cold. I wanted to see if giving away years of work and craft could lead to real impact (heh… Impact).
Can you help me find out?
Anyways, go download Outpact, and make cool stuff with it. ** Subscribe to our mailing list too!**
We’ve got a serif in the works. And other things planned. But for that to happen…
đź’Ą Use Outpact.
đź’Ą Buy it if you can.
đź’Ą Tag me when you do.
— Ro