Drawing the cut-edge serif: eleven versions of an H.
Every typeface has a defining glyph — the letter that decides what the face wants to be. For Halberd Display the H carried the whole conversation. We started with a soft-edge geometric, retreated to a half-bracketed Bodoni, then tried a guillotine-cut with no bracket at all. Each version revealed something: the soft edge looked friendlier than we wanted, the bracket weighed it down, the guillotine read as cold.
What landed, after eleven sketches and three direction-shifts, was a hybrid. The serif terminates with a small geometric beak — flat-topped, slightly angled, almost stamped — which gives the letter a confident foothold without the icy formality of a strict modern. The shape works at 240 pt and at 14, which is unusual for a high-contrast didone, and which made it the right call for the magazine that originally commissioned the typeface.
Below: the eleven Hs, in order, with annotations on what each iteration was trying to fix.
