Text by Grendl Löfkvist, for Typographica’s Favorite Typefaces of 2019:

“Cloisterfuch is a chunky, striking blackletter that takes the varying pen angles and waisted strokes found in calligraphic scripts and pushes them to an extreme. The result is an exaggerated, blocky face with personality, best viewed large on the page. 

Cloisterfuch’s letterforms draw mostly on Textura Quadrata, with a little Fraktur influence in the majuscules. This is especially manifest in their robust, curvaceous, pendulous “elephant trunks”, a.k.a. “Schnorkels”. Cloisterfuch’s lowercase contains few such rounded strokes, as befits a traditional Textura.

This typeface is far from static, however. There are hardly any straight lines to be seen (only the hairline strokes, and even some of those are slightly waisted, such as the slash that defines the ø). Extreme flaring, waisting, and cupping can bestow a cartoonish quality on type. Cloisterfuch definitely walks that line, but doesn’t cross it. The result is a friendlier, less relentlessly brutal type than a Schaftstiefel­grotesk, for instance, although it’s hardly the Blackletter Lite™ you’d find on a poppy nu-metal album cover.

The letter and counter spacing provide a fine balance of black and white on the page, with black emerging victorious. That balance, plus the thick wedge-shaped blood drops languor­ously dripping from the top strokes of the r, c, and the crossbar of the t, helps keep one’s horror vacui in check.

Basically, if you’re looking for a playful, beefy, mostly PG-rated blackletter display face, Cloisterfuch might just be the ticket.”