Font Catalogue’s Cringe Gothic is a weird yet genuinely useful sans

Cringe Gothic began with sketches of uncomfortable letterforms, drawn by type designer Ale Navarro. They were typographically illogical in places, with curves that felt off and terminals that challenged convention. Font Catalogue’s job was to contain that energy without killing it – to work out what to keep, what to push back on and how to make something weird into something useful. The result is an eight-weight grotesque sans shaped around the ‘post-cringe aesthetic’ – a cultural shift where awkwardness, vulnerability and being off-kilter are embraced as a new kind of honesty. The name itself came from illustrations drawn by Buen Muchacho. “There was something funny and ridiculous about them, a retro quality that felt embarrassing in the best possible way,” Jorge Cisterna, Co-founder of Font Catalogue, explains. From there, the team explored the cringe trend and realised the typeface was “a perfect fit: weird shapes, unexpected proportions, a personality that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Post-cringe, to us, means owning the awkward instead of hiding it.” Font Catalogue generally designs typefaces with structure and functionality as the priority, so the sinuous quality of Navarro’s initial drawings ran against the grain, especially for the more seasoned designers on the team. “Containing the movement of the forms without flattening the character was probably the hardest thing to get right,” Cisterna explains. “The ‘G,’ ‘g’ and ‘a’ are the most distinctive – and the most unruly. They’re where the awkwardness lives most openly,” he details. “But glyphs like the ‘r’ and ‘t’ tell a different story: they hold the balance between personality and function, and in some ways they’re what make the typeface actually usable across a range of contexts.”