Shavian is an alternate writing system for English, where one sound corresponds to one letter, and vice versa (for the most part). It was published in 1962, and added to Unicode in April 2003.
The alphabet is partially featural, which means related sounds have related shapes, such as /p t k s/ being 𐑐 𐑑 𐑒 𐑕, and their voiced versions, /b d g z/ being their flipped versions, 𐑚 𐑛 𐑜 𐑟.
Shavian.info also has a list of fonts that support Shavian.
A recurring design decision I have made with these fonts is to make the letters all have the same height, which I refer to as “unicase Shavian” (which is not entirely accurate, since Shavian has no letter case to begin with, but since this makes Shavian look more like all-caps Latin text, I found the term to be apt enough).
However, a glaring problem presents itself when removing the height distinction: the consonant characters 𐑐 𐑚 𐑓 𐑝 and the vowel characters 𐑪 𐑧 𐑨 𐑩 are only distinguished by height, so they have to be distinguished some other way.
I was inspired by this image from one of Kingsley Read’s earlier drafts for what would eventually become Shavian, where he tackled this very same problem of unicase Shavian.
Image from this article by
Leo Philip.
Read added crossbars on the stems to signify how many rule lines the letter was to cross. He also had looped letters, which went unused in the final Shavian alphabet.
Based on those, 𐑐 and 𐑚 gained loops to resemble the Latin “P” and “b”, while 𐑓 and 𐑝 gained crossbars to resemble “f”.
Americium is a blobby retro-futuristic font with two stroke thicknesses in one. It is a Shavian adaptation of Stan Davis’s font “Amelia” from 1964 (or 1965 or 1967 depending on which source you ask), and is famous for being used in the “MOON BOOT” logo and the logo for the Beatles’ movie “Yellow Submarine”.
Americium is a radioactive chemical element, first synthesized in 1944 (but kept secret until November 1945 since it was part of the Manhattan Project). This name was chosen not only due to its alphabetic proximity to “Amelia”, but due to Amelia being created in the latter half of the Atomic Age (1945–’80s), a synthetic, radioactive element seemed to fit the retrofuturistic aesthetic of the font.
Allstars Shavian is a sentence-case Shavian 8x8 pixel font. Its uppercase Latin portion was based on the text from Super Mario All-Stars.
Stampatello Faceto is an open-source block-script handwriting font based on my own handwriting on a Stabilo 7mm felt tip pen. It supports ligatures for 𐑩𐑯, 𐑾𐑯, and 𐑦𐑙 for a more natural feel.
“Stampatello faceto” is Italian for “facetious block script”; I chose the Italian term because Italian block script writes the lowercase “a” in its 2-storey form like I do!
It also supports Cyrillic, polytonic Ancient Greek, and (most) IPA.
Space Mono Shavian is a Shavian extension of Space Mono by Colophon. It is geometric, and its most distinguishable feature is the thin joints where two near-parallel strokes meet.
Audio Nugget is a rounded blocky display font inspired by the Y2K aesthetic. Its name is a reference to the YouTube channel DankPods, who reviews music players which he calls “nuggets”.
Born2bSporty FS is a pixel font with 2px strokes and a high x-height. It has expansive multilingual support spanning 6 writing systems (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hiragana, Katakana, Shavian) and lots of accented characters, technical characters, and symbols.
It is a remake of the original Born2bSporty font.
Consistency is a modern serif font with a tall x-height, designed for children and academics alike.
Consistency Shavian is an unofficial extension of the font Computer Modern Serif, which was created by Donald Knuth as the default font for TeX.
Banter Shavian is a comic-style display font intended for onomatopoeia and yelling. Two versions are available: “Unicase” and “Triline”.
Banter is an unofficial extension of the font Bangers by Vernon Adams, which has been skewed 11° to the left to undo its slant. The user is free to skew it as they wish. Banter also enhances the multilingual support of Bangers, and expands its Latin portion to support countless languages.
Mikado Shavian is a playful rounded font, originally by Hannes Van Döhren. It had also been my branding font for years, prior to switching to Bricolage Grotseque! This is an (unauthorized) extension of its Bold weight for the Shavian alphabet.
Starzoom Shavian is a futuristic display font. It has angular cutaways that suggest speed, and is also available with a slant for a bit of extra speediness.
As an overdue April Fool’s joke on 2024-04-03, I made a Deseret version of Starzoom.
Download
Back Log Shavian is a comic book font based on Back Issues BB by Blambot Comic Fonts (free for non-profit or indie comics use). It is a unicase styled font.
Impetus Shavian is a bold, industrial display font that adapts the design of Impact by Geoffrey Lee, made famous by its inclusion in the Core Fonts for the Web and its eventual notoriety as the image macro meme font. If you want to make memes in the Shavian alphabet, here's your match!
Minecraft Shavian is an 8px proportional pixel font that adapts the look of the default system font of Minecraft.
Fami Sans Bold Shavian is an 8px fixed-width pixel font that mimics the look of 8-bit video games, such as on the Famicom/NES. It is a unicase styled font.
