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.

See also: Sophisto Breaks Basic Sans Monotony

Yves Peters is a graphic designer / rock drummer / father of three who tries to be critical about typography without coming across as a snob. Previously a columnist for Typographer.org and editor-in-chief of The FontFeed, he currently divides his time between teaching at the Communication, Media and Design department of Artevelde University of Applied Sciences, and publishing at Adobe Create and writing for a variety of type foundries, weaving pop culture and design trends into foundational typographic stories. His ability to identify most typefaces on sight is utterly useless in daily life.