Serif Forked/Spurred Gomu 13 is a bold, narrow, high contrast, upright, normal x-height font.
Keywords: posters, headlines, signage, book covers, logotypes, victorian, circus, western, vintage, theatrical, display impact, vintage flavor, ornamental texture, poster presence, bracketed, spurred, forked, ink-trap-like, softened.
A compact serif with a lively, ornamental outline and prominent forked/spurred terminals. Stems are sturdy and mostly vertical, while rounded forms show pronounced swelling into heavy curves, creating a strong black presence. Serifs are bracketed and often end in small hooks or split tips, and many joins and terminals show slight notches and nicks that read like deliberate cuts. Counters are relatively tight and the fit is condensed, giving lines a dense, poster-like rhythm. Numerals and capitals carry the same decorative terminal language, with distinctive curled details on forms like 2, 3, and 7.
Best suited to display applications such as posters, headlines, packaging labels, and signage where an ornate vintage character is desired. It can also work for short bursts of text—taglines, pull quotes, or chapter openers—when set with generous spacing and ample size to keep the decorative terminals crisp.
The overall tone is showy and period-flavored, evoking old playbills, circus posters, and frontier-era signage. The spurred terminals and carved-looking notches add a slightly mischievous, theatrical voice that feels more expressive than formal.
The design appears intended to reinterpret traditional serif construction through a decorative, forked-terminal treatment, producing a condensed, attention-grabbing texture tailored to titling and branding. Its strong vertical emphasis and consistent spur motif suggest a goal of immediate recognizability and period atmosphere rather than quiet long-form reading.
In text, the decorative terminals remain consistently applied, but the busy edge detail can create visual sparkle and texture, especially where repeated verticals and forks cluster (e.g., m/n/h and dense word shapes). The design favors display sizes where the small cuts and hooks can be clearly perceived without cluttering the word image.