I love that, despite the relative simplicity of the composition, each of your subjects feels so alive. Your drawings feel less like a faithful rendering of a bird, and more like a vital being who exists in a world beyond the page.

This is all to say: In addition to disambiguation being both a necessary and joyful quality of legible typefaces, there is also something about the purely visual quality of a block of well-designed text that also seems to correspond to legibility, and is a hallmark of all of my favorite typefaces.

Case in point, I happened to be on allrecipes.com the other day, and (having not visited in a while) was immediately taken by what felt like a very Lettermatic face. After some brief sleuthing, I found your X post about the creation of Copper Pot. Needless to say, a delightful surprise!

To be clear, I don't claim that my taste is some kind of objective truth. But for me, Really Sans is one of those faces that grabs my attention before I've read a single word, simply because of how it hangs together in space. There's a kind of visual music happening between the letters-as-symbols.

One could conceivably create a typeface that has a pleasing gestalt while being illegible (it is, as you say, the relationship between the black shapes and the white shapes), but given that type is typically made for reading, I tend to find that faces with a good gestalt are also eminently legible.

I've always had a thing for text faces, the ostensibly unsexy workhorses of the type world. One thing that has struck me from a young age is the gestalt of a page — how a visual wall of text *feels* prior to being discerned as letters and words. Certain faces, for me, have a kind of resonance.

I've been off Twitter for a number of months now, and I didn't realize how much I missed your threads. In addition to being concise and insightful, you do such a beautiful job of visually articulating the concepts you're describing.

This thread brought something else to mind as well:

Yes, please!