Squarish Klavika Almost Didn't Happen

Eric Olson's Process Type Foundry just released Klavika, an OpenType family which follows the recent trend of straight-sided technical sans serifs (see Sophisto, Fishmonger, Morgan Sans, and Stainless). The family comes in four weights with matching small caps and italics, and features all the trimmings -- from extended ligature sets, alternate numeral styles and a nice collection of arrows, to support for a plethora of foreign languages.

Klavika is a versatile workhorse typeface. Despite its clean design, it manages to retain a certain warmth and openness. The roman sports a lovely lowercase 'a', a cute little alternate ampersand, and one of the most beautiful lowercase 'g's I've seen in this type of design. The fact that it is released as "fat OpenType" is just icing on the cake and gives the competition a serious run for its money.

It came as a bit of a surprise when Eric confessed that the typeface nearly escaped an early death:

I was a little reluctant about the face for several months and even shelved it completely at one point. Anytime you apply some amount of simple geometry (in this case, straight sides) to a face the chances for stylistic overlap become great. Faces like DIN, Sophisto, Bell Gothic etc. have straight sides so the push to differentiate from them was tough. In the end I just forgot about it and tried to make an open, solid and logical typeface. Hopefully something flexible and rugged.

Posted by Yves Peters | December 10, 2004 | LINK

Comments

I really think Klavika is an achievement, bringing some warmth to a still neutral, high-tech looking design. And it manages to get openness into relatively narrow design, which gives it an inviting readability compared to many sans. I hope we see a lot of it.

William Berkson | Dec 13, 2004 09:00 AM

William wrote his comment over 3 years ago and his wish has come true. We're seeing a lot of Klavika. Here is the Fonts in Use page at Process and here are a few images and links I've collected.

Stephen Coles | May 20, 2008 03:45 PM

It is also being used a lot by Chevrolet in some of their collateral and advertising.

Chris Keegan | Jun 2, 2008 06:38 AM

@Chris Klavika is the new typeface for Chevrolet (and GM). It is all over the artwork in the site for advertisers.

Tiffany | Jun 22, 2008 09:59 AM