Bastardica

About

Bastardica is a small, wonderfully odd web tool that makes new fonts by mixing existing ones. You pick a base font and one or more mix-in fonts, tell it to swap in a glyph from the mix-in every so many characters, and download the result as a working font. It is for designers, zine makers, web tinkerers and anyone who likes typography with a bit of mischief in it. What makes it clever is how the output works. Every download is a normal OpenType font, and the swap is done with a contextual ligature substitution registered for every script, so browsers and design tools apply it automatically with no extra code. Everything runs locally in your browser using Pyodide and fontTools, so the fonts you upload never leave your machine. Bastardica was made by Mitya, an independent developer who publishes his projects at mitpit.com, and it was inspired by the Times New Bastard and Easy Pete experiments. It drew attention in September 2026, including a write-up on Boing Boing. Highlights: • Mix a base font with one or more mix-in fonts, swapping every Nth glyph • Effects on mix-in glyphs such as scale, Y-offset and skew to make them sit nicely • Upload your own fonts, or load the full Google Fonts catalog into the menus • Simple and advanced modes, with randomize buttons for happy accidents • Presets to load ready-made combinations in one click • Live preview with light and dark backgrounds • Export as TTF, OTF or WOFF2 Bastardica is free to use in any modern browser, with no account and nothing to install. It adds no licence conditions of its own to the fonts you make, and a credit is appreciated but optional. Mixing two fonts creates a derivative work, though, so check the licences of your source fonts before using a result commercially.

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