Meet the World’s Thinnest Font

We are pleased to introduce a unique extension to our Kohinoor typefaces. It is the least-traditional part of the series yet! We call it Kohinoor Zerone. The addition is a family of two fonts named Kohinoor One and Kohinoor Zero. While Kohinoor One is the thinnest font ever produced, Kohinoor Zero goes a step beyond.

The strokes of the glyphs in Kohinoor One are just one-unit thick. As far as we’re aware, that makes Kohinoor One the thinnest retail or open-source font currently available in the market (indeed. there are fonts available elsewhere with strokes that are four or even two units wide). The only way to make letters thinner than just one unit wide is to make them be zero units wide. That means that their strokes consist of just single strokes rather than two paths separated by one unit of space. Yet, it is impossible to export single strokes from a font editor and install that as a font in your operating system. Essentially, Kohinoor Zero is a base for designers to make their own creative digital lettering. You decide yourself what kind of outline to apply to the skeleton of the letters.

Many designers already draw single-stroke lettering in applications like Illustrator and then space and kern the letters in that lettering themselves. But as a workflow that is slow and not ideal. At ITF, we came up with a work-around. We “temporarily” closed the counters of all the letters by a straight line and aligned these nodes as the same place under the baseline. Because that resulted in closed-shape forms, we could export those outlines as a proper OpenType font. To work with Kohinoor Zero, you first need to set text in an app like InDesign or Illustrator. Then, you convert that text into outlines. Finally, you must delete all the nodes below the baseline. That leaves you with simple outlines. Remove the fill color and apply the stroke, brush, or outline of your choice.

Satya Rajpurohit began developing Kohinoor Zerone more than a dozen years ago. He first presented the idea at TypeCon 2010 in Los Angeles. Kohinoor Zerone is the newest member of Kohinoor Multiscript – ITF’s first superfamily. As a series of fonts, Kohinoor was designed in a humanist sans serif style suitable for body text and display text, too. It is an all-around typeface for graphic designers, software engineers, and branding specialists. Thanks to its clear appearance, Kohinoor is easy to work with and inviting to read.

Kohinoor Zerone is 100% FREE for personal and commercial use. You can download your free copy from ITF as well as from Fontshare.com websites.