In the crowded urban environment, space for signage is always at a premium. From crummy liquor stores to majestic theaters, sometimes signs have nowhere to go but up.
Bungee is a font that celebrates urban signs that stack the Latin alphabet, one letter on top of the other, in order to make dramatic use of limited space. Following their lead, Bungee typesets horizontally and vertically, so it is always ready to take your text in a new direction.
Bungee’s letterforms were designed to reinforce a sense of verticality. Round characters like O and diagonal characters like A are straight-sided, and letters like L and I gain serifs in order to create vertical words with well-defined left and right edges.
To contribute, see github.com/djrrb/Bungee
Bungee was an early experimental color font, and has been updated as color font technology has developed over the past decade. Both Bungee Tint (flat colors) and Bungee Spice (gradients) contain multiple color palettes, so it is possible to create chromatic effects even in the most basic typesetting environments. Hopefully these fonts will help designers and developers explore the possibilities of what color fonts have to offer.
Google Fonts distributes seven variants of Bungee, including two color fonts:
Bungee’s downloadable releases also includes special layer fonts (for multicolor typesetting in environments where color fonts are not supported) and rotated fonts (for stacked typesetting in environments where vertical text is not supported).
The Bungee project is led by David Jonathan Ross, and thanks to support from Google and The Font Bureau, Bungee was released under the SIL Open Font License.
In 2023–24, Marte Verhaegen and Just van Rossum produced a major revision (v2), which includes an automated build process as well as many enhancements to the vertical features and color fonts.