Using vertical shear for skewed lettering in Font by Zaweba

Most slanting tools lean letters sideways. Vertical shear does something less common: it tips each letter so one side rises and the other drops, as if the letters were set on a slope. The result looks like lettering painted on the side of a moving van, or a title viewed at an angle.

In Font by Zaweba, vertical shear is an operation in the style stack with a slider from -30 to 30 degrees. Positive and negative values shear the letters in opposite directions, up or down along the line. As with every operation in the stack, it has an on and off switch, a reset button, and a place in the order you can change, and it applies to every letter at once.

What the shear actually does

Picture a capital H. Horizontal shear, the italic operation, keeps its crossbar level and leans its two stems. Vertical shear keeps the stems upright and tilts the crossbar, the top and the bottom, so the whole letter becomes a parallelogram standing on one corner. Round letters such as O become tilted ovals. Letters with lots of horizontal strokes, like E, F and Z, show the effect most strongly.

Because each letter is sheared on its own, a word set in a vertically sheared font has a sawtooth rhythm: each letter rises across its width, and the next one starts again from the baseline. That rhythm is what gives the look its energy. It's not the same as setting a whole line of text on a slope, which you'd do in a layout program.

Where it suits

Vertical shear is a display effect. It's good for a headline, a logo, a sports team name, a sale poster or a game title. It doesn't belong in a paragraph, where the sawtooth rhythm makes reading harder. Small angles are subtle enough to add life without drawing attention to themselves; large angles turn every word into a statement.

It also pairs naturally with other operations. Combined with horizontal shear, the letters become fully skewed, as if seen in a slanted mirror. Combined with perspective, which narrows or widens the top of the letters, you get the sort of dramatic poster lettering that seems to rush past. A heavy weight helps, because thin strokes at a steep shear can look fragile.

Judging the angle

Start small. A few degrees is enough to see what the shear does to your particular letters, and it's easier to judge the look before it gets extreme. Watch words, not single letters: type the actual words the font is for into the live preview and look at them across the waterfall of sizes.

Pay attention to the tops and bottoms of the letters. Because vertical shear moves the top and bottom edges, letters can stick out above the cap height or below the baseline at one side. That's part of the look, but it means tall capitals and descenders can come close to the lines above and below in a block of text. For short display jobs it rarely matters. For anything with several lines, check the preview in lines rather than a waterfall.

The order in the stack

Where you place vertical shear changes how components behave. Serifs and decorations attach to points on the letters, such as stem ends and corners. Shear the letters before those components are added and they attach to the tilted shape; shear afterwards and the components tilt with the letter. Both are valid, and moving the operation up or down the stack and comparing the preview is the quickest way to decide.

Pattern fills are worth a mention. Each letter's pattern starts from its own corner so it lines up across letters. If you want the pattern to stay level while the letter tilts, try putting the pattern fill after the shear; if you want the pattern to tilt too, put it before.

Keeping spacing tidy

Spacing and kerning are redone after every change in Font by Zaweba, so the letters won't overlap just because they've been sheared. Still, a sheared font has unusual edges, and some pairs may look uneven. The kerning pair editor lets you type a pair, adjust it and lock it so it stays put when you change other settings.

Vertical shear is one of the less familiar operations in the stack, and that's what makes it useful: it gives a font a sense of motion that few ready made typefaces have.