Kanon Foundry revives a 1973 paperclip typeface as a 15-style variable font

Paperclip Contour was a display lettering released by Mecanorma in 1973 and designed by Ad Werner — distinctive, modular, and remembered today largely from the record sleeve of The Drifters' 'Kissin' in the Back Row of the Movies.' Type designer Tor Weibull, who co-founded Kanon Foundry with Alexander Örn in 2019, was drawn to its modular expression but found it limiting: the face existed only as a contour with no uppercase, and it was bound to print. A filled version made for the logo of Opzij, a Dutch feminist magazine, had never been commercially released.

Kanon's answer, Clippy, treats the gaps as the design brief. Weibull filled in the letterforms, developed uppercase alongside the lowercase, and redesigned the numbers to fit the system; the letters were refined with fewer diagonals, improved curves and optical adjustments so a 1970s oddity could work in digital settings. The p's still look like the tools that open iPhone SIM trays and some symbols read like alien hieroglyphics, but the typeface now behaves like a toolkit.

The breakthrough was realizing the rounded forms could be a variable font. Clippy moves between Retalic, Roman and Italic masters across 15 styles, rocking back and forth like a roly-poly toy — a nod to the bendy metal of a paperclip. Some glyphs were redrawn to make the rocking work: the lowercase j's wide hook created spacing problems and became a straight, Futura-style tail. Alongside the font, Kanon produced motion assets built to swing and wiggle, and physical roly-poly toys of the lowercase a.

The result turns a typeface that had effectively been frozen since 1973 into a system with a range of weights and a single playful character, and the September 2026 launch was featured by It's Nice That. Clippy's wager is that a distinctive historical face becomes more useful, not less, when someone treats its missing uppercase, filled forms and digital behavior as problems worth solving.