barbecue is a typeface that explores 'typing design'—the idea of making the act of typing itself part of the design practice. When you toggle CAPS LOCK on and off, the letters jump up and down, turning a simple keyboard action into a playful typographic performance.

Xiaoyuan's note:

barbecue is a typeface plays with unconventional alignments, and fun punctuation designs. The hyphen —— is extra long, so people can make ---b-a-r-b-e-c-u-e--- with letters! The dirty trick for playing this typeface — is to shift between CAP and lowercase to have jumping letters.

I have always considered a font file to be a tool for typing. Before digital typefaces existed, there were typewriters. I find that a font file is much like a typewriter; to design a typeface is to design a typewriter, and to design a typing experience is to make an entire typewriter yourself — what happens when you press "tab" on your keyboard, what happens when you cancel the "tab", how letters appears when you keep shifting between CAP and lowercase, etc. There are so much more to exlore in this, I hope I can talk about it more in details someday. :)

/The designer's note sometimes appears in this section, to talk about their thoughts, dirty tricks, random things in related and unrelated to type design./

About barbecue's designer

Xiaoyuan Gao (She/Her) is a Rotterdam-based freelance graphic designer, image-maker, type designer and the initiator of “notyourtypefoundry”. While experimenting with unconventional approaches to type design and typesetting, she sees type design as a tool making process.