Now, to be honest, the history of this typeface is pretty uninspiring. I drew some basic glyphs in my sketchbook, then moved straight into Glyphs app and didn’t leave until 18 fonts with 1,100 glyphs later, Banjax saw the light of day.

Perhaps more interesting is the background story to the word ‘Banjax’ itself. In context, here in Ireland, you might hear something along the lines of “Ah, Jaysus, the feckin’ printer’s banjaxed!”. To translate, this means that someone’s printer has become inoperable and it is quite upsetting to discover this. Essentially, ‘banjax’ as a verb, means to mess up, or destroy, and, as a noun, a mess or a piece of junk. First usage colloquially in Ireland has been traced back to the 1920s, with Sean O’Casey’s play Juno and the Paycock being an example.

I would often hear this phrase when I first came to Ireland and always thought there was a certain charm to it. A polite way of saying “fucked up”, if you like, and I am delighted to have finally found a use for it – the family name for this typeface.

So, there are 1,100 glyphs in each of the 18 fonts in the Banjax family, why on earth would you ever need that many? Well, as a former graphic designer I always appreciated expansive typefaces that included true Small Caps, this made typographic explorations much more compelling and enjoyable. Small Caps are included in Banjax, along with all the appropriate diacritics for extensive language support.

I have also included Petite Caps that harmonise with the lowercase characters. Again, as a graphic designer, I would love to create unicase logotypes/brand marks – in most fonts there would be a mismatch between the reduced caps and lowercase characters in weight/balance, so I would have to manually adjust glyphs to get the exact style I was looking for. With Banjax, you can create unicase style typography “right out of the box”, just switch to Small Caps and then select Stylistic Set 1. With Adobe’s recent software improvements, selecting a glyph and switching to the alternates available is an even easier process (thank you, Adobe!).

My first attempt at drawing Greek glyphs went well, I think! If there are any Greek-speaking type aficionados out there, please let me know if I can make any improvements for you.

My previous type designs have all contained numerous alternates and ligatures to extend the usability of the fonts. However, this time I could only manage to offer 3 alternates… sorry… they are for the /a/g/&/ glyphs. There are ligatures for /fh/fi/fk/fl/ but these only become apparent in the heavier weights where the terminal of the /f/ shrinks back to avoid clashing with its partner. I think there’s a metaphor in there somewhere!

Right, that’s about it. I hope you enjoy using Banjax, you can try the Regular weight for free – all you need to do is make contact below and I will send the font to you.

If you like Banjax, try

BANJAX NOTCHED