Chutz (5 fonts)

Chutz is an audacious slanted typeface with horizontal contrast and horizontally oriented strokes developed for the Jewish brand Chutzpah of the Feisty Foods company based in Brooklyn, New York. The typeface has three purposes – to feel Jewish, audacious, and delicious. To convey the feeling of Hebrew in Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts, it employs horizontal contrast (opposite to Latin) where horizontal strokes are thicker than vertical ones, and horizontally directed calligraphic strokes inherent in the Hebrew script, making the letters more square.

To evoke associations of deliciousness and resemble dough (in bolder weights), the design received soft details, rounded edges, and a saturated typographic color. To convey boldness and audacity, the structure of the letters features different slant angles for different letters. For example, most letters have a Latin slant (to the right), while others, such as CGOQabcdegopqy, have a typical Hebrew slant (to the left). This combination of different slants gives the typeface a complex and daring character ready for unexpected, bold actions.

Styles: Regular, Medium, Bold, Black, Variable Font.
Scripts: Extended Latin, European & Asian Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Georgian.
Languages: 500+. List of supported languages: https://michaelrafailyk.com/chutz
Kerning: 1666 class-to-class pairs.
Hinting: TrueType autohint.
Format: TTF – OpenType with TrueType outlines.
Variable font: Chutz Variable has a weight axis and includes hundreds of styles ranging from Regular (400) to Black (900), so feel free to choose the exact style you need using a slider in a graphic editor or via CSS on a web page.
Contextual Alternates: Hundreds of letter combinations (such as is, ku, ri, ry, th, tx, Ch, KA, TZ, OD, and many others) have automatically substituted alternate versions, making the type texture more dense and cohesive.
Stylistic Alternates: Stylistic Set 01 “Arrows” Left, Right, Up, Down, Left Right, Up Down, North West, North East, South West, South East.
Ordinals: adehnorst. Superscript, Subscript, Numerator, Denominator: 0123456789.
Fractions: (precomposed). Any other fractions (even those typed through a slash) will also be displayed correctly, with automatic replacement to Numerator + fraction + Denominator.
Standard Ligatures: fi fl.
Case conversion for monotonic Greek: ΆΈΉΊΌΎΏ. Greek uppercase accented characters lose their tonos accent and retain only dieresis in All Caps and Small Caps modes. Turned on by default. If you need tonos accents in All Caps, turn off the Contextual Alternates (calt) feature.
Localized Forms: 29 character substitutions for Azeri, Bulgarian, Catalan, Dutch, German, Kazakh, Macedonian, Moldavian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Tatar, and Turkish languages.
Glyph Composition/Decomposition (Diacritics): Extended Latin and basic Vietnamese set of diacritics (562 characters). Precomposed.
Mark Positioning: 17 Hebrew diacritical marks positioned on the 27 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

The promo images include photos by Ola Rafailyk, and photos by Marta Dzedyshko and Josh Sorenson from Pexels.

The typeface was designed by Michael Rafailyk in 2023 and significantly expanded and updated in 2024.