#condensing

[fontpolice]

Fishing scam

There is no need to do an electronically condensed version of Arial Black, with terrible legibility thanks to the vertical strokes getting too thin, when there are perfectly good condensed typefaces out there.

[amrv-5]

🎲 for beejhawk (right back at ya if ur down 👀)!

HELLO ALLISON!!!!!!! Thank you for the prompt and YAY I had such a good time with it!!! I'm trying to keep these under 1K and it's Such a weird new challenge... hope you enjoy as much as I enjoyed writing!!!

Random number generator rolled up: 15. A kiss along the hips, which seemed just about perfect. Below the cut for Suggestive Actions (wow):

He found Hawkeye leaning over the counter, cutting an appealingly angled silhouette as the late summer sun set through the west-facing windows. His posture was loose, comfortably slouched, his hands in his pockets. Light shone through the aperture of his bent elbows. 

Hawkeye was in his shirtsleeves, after apparently abandoning his suit jacket on the floor of the kitchen. It looked like maybe Hawkeye had tried to toss it onto the table and missed. BJ picked it up, shook it out, and hung it on the back of a chair, watching for a second to ensure it stayed in place. 

“How was work?” he asked. He hadn’t seen Hawkeye all day—BJ had had an intensively scheduled caseload, and Hawkeye was always getting pulled into operations with no notice because he was devastatingly competent and great under pressure. 

“Good,” Hawkeye said, and yawned. “I missed you.” He yawned again, and stretched abruptly, a big dramatic cat-like movement that made his spine arch and his shoulders click. 

BJ smiled, touched, and wandered closer. He’d missed Hawkeye too. It was always nice to get to come together again at the end of a long day. 

“What do you want for dinner?” BJ asked, moving steadily into Hawkeye’s space until he was aligned against his body entirely, his chest pressed to Hawkeye’s back, his chin on Hawkeye’s shoulder. BJ boxed him in, hands against the counter around Hawkeye’s waist. 

“We have Erin today?” Hawkeye asked, shifting so he was leaning against BJ instead of the counter. 

BJ shifted to accommodate him. He wrapped his arms around Hawkeye’s waist more fully. A slow-dance posture. “It’s only Thursday.”

Hawkeye laughed, and laid his head against BJ’s shoulder, swaying with him. “I forgot. Long week.”

“Long week,” BJ repeated into the side of his neck. Hawkeye hummed, pleased, and grasped his forearms, tension steadily leaving his body. Sometimes he still got giddy with touch. BJ could relate. 

He yawned, too, catching it from Hawkeye, who caught it from him again and yawned so significantly his jaw cracked. 

BJ made a noise of surprised sympathy, and shifted to kiss Hawkeye’s jaw.

Hawkeye shivered, but—not a typical shiver. More of a jump. 

“What?” BJ asked, trying not to yawn again. 

“Sorry. Tickled for a second,” Hawkeye said, tense. He indicated BJ’s hands loosely, which had fallen to rest on his hips as he’d moved. 

“I didn’t think I caught your ribs,” BJ said, apologetic. Some tickling was fun, but there was a spot on Hawkeye’s upper ribs that usually ended up with BJ getting an instinctive elbow to the diaphragm if he grazed it by accident. 

“Hips,” Hawkeye corrected, relaxing against him again. “Just surprised me.”

“Oh.” BJ grasped Hawkeye’s hip more intentionally, kneading into the soft solidity of his flank. “Really? Here?”

Hawkeye’s shoulders pressed into his chest as he arched into the touch. He laughed, breathy and pleased. “Well, not when you do it like that.”

“Hmm.” BJ rucked his shirt up, tugging the button-down and undershirt out of Hawkeye’s waistband. “And what about this?” He traced as lightly as he could manage over the curve of his hip. Hawkeye had always carried a little softness there, even at his thinnest. Two years out from the end of it all, after Hawkeye had been so ill and so horribly stressed, he was finally starting to look really well again. It was nice to be able to grasp his hip and actually get something to hold. 

Hawkeye barked a laugh, tensing and jolting away until BJ let off of tickling him. “Yes. Fink.”

“Sorry,” BJ said, genuinely contrite. He held himself against Hawkeye’s back again, rubbing his hip, keeping his touch too firm to tickle. “I’ll make it up to you.”

“Ah. And what do you have in mind?” Hawkeye grinned at him over his shoulder, ridiculously earnest, eyes squinting shut under the force of his own happiness. 

BJ leaned in, angling his head as though he was about to go in for a kiss, but paused half an inch from Hawkeye’s lips. “Turn around,” he suggested, barely audible, and backed off.

Hawkeye turned, bracing himself against the counter, eyes bright as BJ knelt. He took his time on the way down, smoothing his hands over every part of Hawkeye he could reach—shoulders, chest, stomach, then down his thighs and back up. 

“How’s this?” BJ asked, slipping Hawkeye’s belt open. Hawkeye leaned back and let him do it, hands planted firmly on the counter. 

“No complaints from the gallery,” Hawkeye said, wiggling his hips as BJ tugged his trousers partially down. 

BJ knelt up, bracing himself against Hawkeye’s thighs, and, before Hawkeye could get a hand in his hair to direct BJ where he really wanted him, he pressed a kiss to Hawkeye’s hip, just over the place his belt usually settled, a silent apology for taking him off guard. Hawkeye sighed, pushing into his touch. BJ failed to resist the urge to turn the kiss into a gentle bite. 

Hawkeye moaned quietly and grabbed for his shoulder. “You’d better kiss that better.”

“If you insist,” BJ said, and did as he was told.

[fontpolice]

They’re in the queue

Don’t electronically condense your type to such an extent that the horizontals are thicker than the verticals when you can choose a condensed typeface. And leave enough room for all the letters.

[fontpolice]

Congested

Even a subtle electronic condensing does not help with legibility—either use a proper condensed typeface or have smaller type in its natural proportions.

[fontpolice]

Fusion cuisine

When putting signs side by side, remember to space them properly. Also, avoid stretching or condensing your type artificially, and use a proper apostrophe. Quite a few charges here from the Font Police. (Shared by Mark A. Rayner on Mastodon, where we found it, and reposted by him on Tumblr here.)

[fontpolice]

Losing faith Maybe we should be more tolerant of the lettering done by the amateurs—spacing and centring are not everyone’s strengths. But the top line with the church’s name? There’s no excuse for squashing ITC Benguiat that badly. (Spacing, kerning, and centring could be better, too.)

[fontpolice]

Font Police US election special If you’re going to do a fake newspaper front page, then make sure the new word in the headline is in the same typeface as the old word (an electronically condensed Verdana is not the same as Franklin Gothic Condensed), and that the strapline is not so obviously a desktop cut of Times New Roman that’s been set as a bitmap on to the original graphic (The Washington Times used a slightly condensed display cut).

[fontpolice]

Breaking news What’s wrong with this headline? It’s not a slanted roman, so that’s a good sign (although one wonders why italicization was needed). It’s the electronic condensing—again. Not really excusable when there are decent condensed headline cuts out there. Shared by John Bull (@garius) on Twitter, who also came up with the title (we couldn’t think of a better one), with original photograph by RA from Aberdeen.