Shop Sans is a typeface for curved text paths
13 comments
·November 12, 2025jasonjmcghee
I'm out of the loop on pricing models for fonts, but is it normal to base it on number of visitors to your site?
stronglikedan
Yes, and this pricing is quite reasonable too.
thelogicguy
This is consistent with photo licensing, which is often scaled based on the potential number of viewers for both print and digital.
youngtaff
Depends on the vendor… some also prevent things like subsetting or rely on methods for counting usage that slow down pages (Typekit)
dylan604
is this for someone that doesn't have access to proper typesetting software? i guess that could be cool if along side the font size you have a radius entry for programs that do not have a type-on-path tool. i'm just spoiled and have the proper tools so this causes me to tilt my head and ask why
bobbylarrybobby
It's not just about curving the baseline, the glyphs themselves curve according to the user-specified curve radius. Check out the second image/gif with curve optimizations on/off.
tobr
This is about how each character adapts to the radius, not the path itself. Each character is tweaked so the design holds up as it’s curved. I don’t think you have tools to do that.
CharlesW
FWIW, people have glyph warping text (both on and off paths) using tools like Adobe Illustrator for as long as I can remember. I also don't quite get why one might want a capability that supports one type of glyph warping in the typeface itself.
Luc
A font is designed to have certain attributes (e.g. harmony between the letters). It is not clear that this harmony is preserved if you distort the font algorithmically. For this font the designer ensured that it is preserved.
tobr
Because it allows the effect of the curvature to be customized by hand for each letter shape by a skilled designer. Fonts like italics, bold or condensed can also be approximated with simple geometric operations, but I think you would agree that that looks terrible.
Hug of death, it seems. https://hex.xyz/news/2/ has some info about the font.