Redaction Font Family

Redaction Font Family is a serif typeface designed by Jeremy Mickel (MCKL) with creative direction by Forest Young. It was commissioned for The Redaction, the 2019 collaboration between artist Titus Kaphar and poet and lawyer Reginald Dwayne Betts at MoMA PS1, which drew on lawsuits filed by the Civil Rights Corps on behalf of people jailed because they could not pay bail, fines and fees.

The design is rooted in Times New Roman and Century Schoolbook, the de facto typefaces of American legal documents, but the familiar forms are heightened: soft round terminals meet razor-sharp thin strokes, a nod to the eagle of the presidential seal holding both the olive branch and the arrows.

Redaction is published as seven related families. The base family is the clean drawing; the numbered families are optical sizes rendered through progressively degraded, bitmap-derived forms, referencing the photocopied and degraded documents that move through the legal system. The numbered optical sizes are not interpolation-compatible with one another, so the project is released as static fonts rather than a variable font.

To contribute, see https://github.com/jeremymickel/Redaction