WTF Hammer is a contemporary grotesk superfamily featuring 12 width variants plus its matching italics.

Designed as an expressive typeface, its wide range of proportions invites experimentation with staggered compositions, compact headlines, and dynamic layouts.

Ranging from Super Compressed to Wide, Hammer offers a flexible system for creating rhythm, contrast, and visual tension. Its extensive range of widths makes it especially suited for headlines and display typography, while offering plenty of flexibility across editorial design, web, branding, cultural projects, and more.

The story behind the font:

WTF Hammer began with a simple question: how much can a typeface say through its proportions alone?

At W Type Foundry, we already had display typefaces in our catalogue, but we felt there was room for something different: a contemporary grotesk that brought back some of the character and presence of oversized wood type, while feeling entirely at home in today’s graphic design landscape. Rather than building a family around an extensive range of weights, we wanted to explore the expressive possibilities of width.

The result is WTF Hammer, 12 widths, from XXXX Compressed to Wide. Its proportions are the driving force behind the design. The narrower styles bring speed and efficiency to compact compositions, while the wider ones take up space with confidence. Moving between them creates rhythm, contrast and visual tension, allowing designers to build headlines and layouts that feel dynamic rather than static.

From the beginning, we imagined WTF Hammer almost as a character. Someone with a big presence who makes an impression the moment they walk into a room, but who doesn’t take themselves too seriously. Confident, a little rebellious and occasionally extravagant. We drew on the attitude and visual energy of 1990s sports and advertising culture, not to create a sports typeface, but to capture that feeling of impact, movement and larger-than-life personality.

That thinking carried through to the launch visuals. We wanted to show WTF Hammer in the kinds of places where it could really come to life: bold editorial compositions, advertising, product imagery and graphic layouts that push its different widths in unexpected ways. The aim was to create a visual world that felt as expressive as the typeface itself, while showing how much variety can come from a single family.

Hammer was designed for people who enjoy experimenting with typography. It’s not trying to be the quietest typeface in the room. It’s a tool for designers who want to play with scale, stretch, compression and composition, and give their words a little more presence.