Ballspoint

Ink traps are an old, unglamorous piece of typographic engineering. Corners cut out of a letter so that ink, spreading on cheap paper at small sizes, fills the gap instead of the counter. Solve a problem by leaving something out. Ballspoint has ink traps. They do the job ink traps do. They also do another one. Nothing is hidden. Every cut is visible at every size. Whether you see it depends entirely on how closely you were prepared to look — which is a reasonable description of the problem this typeface is about.

That second number looks like good news, and it is. It's also the reason many don't take the first one seriously. Testicular cancer is the most common cancer in men aged 15 to 49. Not melanoma. Not lymphoma. Testicular. It peaks between 30 and 34 — an age at which no one has ever received a letter from the NHS about anything. If caught while it's still in the testicle, 99% of men are alive five years later. Caught once it's reached the lungs or the liver, the survival rate drops to 72%. And catching it early doesn't just change the odds, it changes the treatment. Catch it early, it's usually surgery and monitoring. Diagnosed late, it's chemotherapy, more surgery, and a much longer year.

UK cases are up 25% since the early nineties, and the same rise shows up almost everywhere that bothers to count. In the US it went up 51% in twenty-two years. In Slovenia and the Netherlands it has roughly doubled. Nobody knows why. It's not diet. Not alcohol. It's not anything you did or didn't do — the leading theory points at something environmental that happened before you were born. There is no lifestyle lever here. Nothing to give up, no habit to fix, no way to lower your odds. There's no screening programme either. No blood test at a check-up, no invitation letter, no reminder text. For prostate cancer there's a PSA test and a conversation with a GP. For this, there is you. You are the screening programme.

The advice used to be "once a month, in the shower". It isn't any more, because there's no evidence a rigid routine works better than simple familiarity. Know what's normal for you. If something is different, go to your GP. Different means: a lump or swelling in one testicle, one getting noticeably bigger, a change in firmness, an ache, a feeling of heaviness that stays. Most lumps turn out to be nothing — cysts, mostly. Let a doctor tell you that. Not the internet, and not you.

Five percent of men say they don't know how to check. It was 68% in 2014, so the awareness campaigns worked. Almost a third of men have never done it. Among 18 to 24 year-olds — the ones most at risk — it's 59%. And almost a quarter say they wouldn't go to their GP even if they found something. Not because they're frightened. Because of the waiting time. Knowing was never the problem.

Ballspoint is a modification of Nimbus Sans L, URW's open-source font, redrawn in Adobe Illustrator, taken in to Glyphs. Four styles: Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic. Desktop and web. Nimbus Sans L → Ballspoint. Nimbus Sans L is released under the GNU General Public License; Ballspoint inherits it. Free, in both senses. Use it for anything and everything. If you don't want to remind a friend to check their testicles, send Ballspoint to them instead.

NHS — how to check, and how to see someone. Orchid — the UK charity for testicular, prostate and penile cancer. Founded by a survivor in 1996. Movember — Know Thy Nuts, every April. Cancer Research UK — where every number on this page came from.

How to check your testicles