Distressed Gofu 1 is a regular weight, narrow, high contrast, italic, short x-height font.
Keywords: posters, album art, book covers, horror titles, game titles, raw, expressive, gritty, handmade, moody, handmade feel, dramatic impact, rough texture, edgy tone, brushy, spiky, tapered, textured, scratchy.
A jagged, hand-rendered display face with brush-like strokes that taper sharply at terminals and swell unevenly through the stem. Letterforms lean with a lively, calligraphic rhythm, and edges look rough and dry-brushed, producing broken contours and slight ink scatter. Proportions are compact and upright in feel despite the slant, with tall ascenders/descenders and small interior counters that can close up at smaller sizes. The overall texture is consistent across caps, lowercase, and numerals, with intentionally irregular stroke joins and occasional hooked or flicked endings.
Best suited to headlines and short phrases where texture and attitude are the main goal—posters, cover art, title cards, and thematic packaging. It can work for pull quotes or subheads when given enough size and spacing, but the rough edges and tight counters make it less ideal for dense body text.
The font conveys an energetic, scrappy attitude—part punk flyer, part dark fairytale lettering. Its roughened strokes and sharp flicks create a tense, dramatic tone that feels handmade and slightly untamed rather than polished.
The design appears intended to emulate fast, bristly brush lettering with distressed ink behavior, prioritizing personality and atmosphere over typographic neutrality. Its consistent roughness and dramatic terminals suggest a purpose-built display style for evocative, theme-forward typography.
In longer lines, the persistent surface texture becomes a dominant graphic element, creating a mottled, high-energy color on the page. The slanted, spiky terminals add motion and bite, while the narrow set and tight counters suggest using generous tracking and comfortable sizes when readability matters.