Sequoia Display: a WPA poster letterform with a variable-width dial

Design style

Sequoia Display draws from the lettering on 1930s National Park Service posters, and it keeps the hand-built quality of that source rather than smoothing it into a generic revival. Strokes are heavy and slightly uneven in a way that reads as carved or painted rather than typeset. Curves have a soft, rounded quality, and terminals are blunt, not sharp. It’s a chunky, warm letterform with none of the geometric discipline of a modern sans — the appeal is in the imperfection.

The variable width axis is the real design idea here. Rather than shipping one weight and calling it done, Sequoia lets you dial the letters from extra narrow to extra wide on a continuous slider, mimicking the way sign painters would compress or stretch lettering to fill a fixed space. That’s a genuine nod to the source material, where hand-lettered headlines were routinely squeezed or stretched to hit a margin. If you don’t want to fuss with variable font tooling, five fixed-width instances cover the same range in discrete steps.

Character set and features

As a display face built for short bursts of text, Sequoia’s letterforms are big, bold, and built to be read from a few feet back rather than set in paragraphs. The width axis is the standout feature — practically, it means one family can hit a headline’s exact measure without cropping, kerning tricks, or swapping to a condensed cut that doesn’t match stylistically. That’s a real workflow advantage over static families where