The v0.14 cover specimen: ten styles, one toy box.
You buy Gimme the way you buy a house off-plan. The current version is 0.14, the foundry says one style is on the chopping block, and that is the point.
Future Fonts sells typefaces while they are still being made. A foundry puts a family up at an early version, buyers pay the current price, and every later version is theirs for nothing; the price rises as the family fills in. Gimme has been on the site since March 2020 — six years in progress — and its story starts with a lost game: Arthur Reinders Folmer of Typearture in Haarlem was beaten at Battleship by his nephew, looked at the pegs, and saw an alphabet.
Ten styles later, each one is a different toy drawn in full colour with its own shadows and highlights. Battleboats is the pegs; Constructo is Meccano strips and bolts; Chugga is wooden train track, with the trains still on it and, as of this version, an open-rail variant; Lowball is fanned playing cards; Mibster is marbles, a mib being playground slang for one; and the rest of the box holds game controllers with their tangled leads, a Connect Four grid, building blocks and tiles. The release notes for v0.14, live since 12 August, read like a letter from someone who has been at this a while: almost every family redrawn with crisper shadows, Battleboats now fully three-dimensional, Lowball “another step closer to a real set of playing cards”, and then, under next steps, “One style is still on the chopping block, and I don’t think it’s hard to see which one. Mibster: you might be in trouble!”
The technical picture is honest and a little fiddly, and the foundry says so. Gimme ships as colour fonts in two flavours — SVG for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, COLR for the Affinity suite and Microsoft software — and the variable-colour versions only work in recent Adobe releases, Affinity and browsers. There is no hinting, on the stated grounds that it “will probably do more harm than good” at the sizes this is meant for, which is huge. All families except Constructo have their full planned character set; the license covers desktop and web; and there are free trial files, which is the right way to find out whether your software can draw a Meccano letter M.
$180 at v0.14, with every future version included. Whether that is a bargain depends on what you would do with a headline set in train track, and the answer for most people is: one poster, once, and grin at it. That is fine. Fonts like this exist so that the one poster is possible.