HYPERWAVE: a triple-set marker font for loud, handmade branding

Design style

HYPERWAVE is a rough, fast marker script built for volume rather than nuance. Sam Parrett has drawn it with the kind of brush strokes that skid at the end of a downstroke and thicken where the pen presses in — the sort of mark you get from a dry marker dragged quickly across paper. There’s no attempt at cleanup: the edges are ragged, the strokes overshoot their baselines slightly, and the ink looks inconsistent from letter to letter, which is clearly the point. This isn’t a script trying to look considered. It’s a shout.

What separates it from a lot of one-off marker fonts is that it comes as three distinct uppercase sets — Hyperwave One, Two and Three — each with its own take on every letter. Swap between them mid-word and no two letterforms need repeat, which does a lot to fight the mechanical look that plagues most brush fonts the moment you type more than a headline’s worth of text.

Character set and features

Each of the three fonts is uppercase-only, with numerals and a broad punctuation set — no lowercase alternates to hunt for, which keeps things simple but also means you’re locked into all-caps setting regardless of which face you pick. There’s multilingual support across a run of Western European languages, so accented characters in French, Spanish, German, Nordic and a handful of others should render fine, which matters if the marker treatment is going to on a product label in more than one market.

There’s no ligature system or OpenType stylistic-set switching baked into a single file — the variation comes from manually alternating between the three separate font files as you type, which is a more manual workflow than contextual alternates would give you, but it does the job if you’re setting short phrases and want texture. Delivered as TTF, so it opens without fuss anywhere.

Use cases

This is a font for moments, not paragraphs. Think single words on packaging, a shout line on a gig poster, a logotype for a brand that wants to look handmade and a bit aggressive, or a quote card built one line at a time. Because the letters are so rough and irregular, anything beyond a few words starts to fight itself — the eye has to work harder to parse each variant, and at small sizes the texture just turns to noise. Keep it big, keep it short, and let the roughness read as intentional rather than illegible.

Merchandise and apparel are obvious fits — the kind of graphic that gets screen-printed rather than read closely. Music and event branding suit it too, anywhere the brief calls for energy over polish. It’s not a font for body copy, for anything formal, or for a brand that needs to look consistent across a wide range of sizes and contexts — the three-set trick only works well when there’s room to actually see the variation.

What we liked, and what we didn’t

Strengths

• Three separate uppercase sets genuinely reduce the repeated-letter look common to brush fonts
• Rough, fast brush texture reads as authentically handmade rather than digitally faked
• Broad multilingual character support across several European languages

Trade-offs

• Uppercase-only across all three fonts, so there's no lowercase option for softer setting
• Legibility drops quickly at small sizes or in longer lines of text

HYPERWAVE is a solid, honest marker font that earns its texture through three genuinely distinct uppercase sets rather than a single repeated alphabet. It's built for short, loud statements — packaging, merch, gig posters — and it will strain fast outside that lane. Buy it for energy, not for flexibility.