Distressed Five 5 is a bold, narrow, high contrast, upright, short x-height font.
Keywords: posters, album art, packaging, headlines, branding, grunge, handmade, punchy, raw, playful, handcrafted feel, gritty texture, expressive display, informal impact, brushy, ragged, blotchy, inked, organic.
A rough, inked display face with brush-like strokes and visibly irregular contours. Letterforms show uneven stroke edges, occasional blots, and subtly fluctuating widths that create a handmade rhythm. Curves are chunky and slightly compressed, while terminals often taper or fray, suggesting dry-brush or worn print texture. Spacing feels moderately tight in words, with a lively, imperfect baseline and a compact lowercase presence compared to the capitals.
Best suited for short, prominent text where texture is an asset: posters, cover art, event graphics, edgy branding, and packaging. It also works well for punchy subheads or pull quotes, especially when paired with a cleaner text face for longer reading.
The font conveys a scrappy, energetic tone—casual and rebellious rather than refined. Its distressed texture and expressive stroke variation read as human-made and immediate, giving text a gritty, indie character with a hint of comic mischief.
The design appears intended to emulate hand-rendered lettering made with a brush or marker under imperfect printing conditions, prioritizing impact and attitude over neutrality. Its controlled irregularity suggests a deliberate distressed treatment meant to add grit and personality to display typography.
The texture remains consistent across caps, lowercase, and numerals, helping the design feel cohesive in longer lines of text. Round characters (like O/Q/0) hold dense, ink-heavy counters, while diagonals and joins show jagged, brushy transitions that emphasize the distressed personality.