This brilliant font is made entirely out of backslashes

A new branding system by Cotton Design for Cornell Tech’s art organization uses a single shape.

Behind the design of almost every typeface is an effort to balance curves with hard edges. But a new typeface from the agency Cotton Design uses just one shape—the backslash—to form every single letter in the alphabet, and somehow it makes perfect sense.

The font, called \Type, is part of a larger branding system created by Cotton Design for Backslash, an organization at Cornell University’s Tech campus that’s dedicated to exploring new concepts combining art and tech. Backslash describes itself as “unconventional” and “surprising”; to truly capture that spirit, Cotton Design took an equally outside-the-box approach in bringing its branding to life.