Tesserae — an experiment in modular variable fonts

With work on Quinoa drawing to a close, I've allowed myself to indulge in a little side project that's been bumbling around in the back of my head for a while. It's a typeface made only from five elements: a square and four corners, used as components to build all glyphs. One could then use stylistic sets to swap out these elements to radically change the flavor of the typeface, or build in a number of variation axes along which one could hollow out, expand and contract, rotate and jiggle the elements for live visual effects (not implemented yet).

Here's what the first draft of the basic alphabet looks like:


And a few variations:





Actually, now that I see those last two examples, I'm tempted to make a spin-off typeface based on this piping principle that connects the free horizontal lines between letters wherever possible...  hm...