Eklekta
Font Design
Eklekta is a custom typeface I designed for the self-promotion of Reinhard & Ostmann, created by combining elements I considered the strongest from four different typefaces.
The project gave me the opportunity to work slowly and obsessively on the details of the letterforms, exploring how the individual characteristics could be distilled into a coherent new typeface. It became both a practical branding project and a deep exploration of typography.
A typeface as self-promotion
Eklekta was drawn for the agency's own identity, which is the rare brief where the only deadline is when it is good enough.
Five letters decide a typeface
a, r, g, p, n. Get these right and the rest of the alphabet follows; get them wrong and no amount of kerning saves it.
The skeleton
Eklekta distils four typefaces I admired into one set of proportions. Fixing the metrics first is what stops that becoming a collage.
The whole alphabet
Capitals and lowercase, drawn to work together. The slow part is the letters nobody notices.
The letter it is known by
The g's tail is cut rather than closed, which is the one deliberate oddity in the face. Two figure sets came with it, tabular for setting and old style for text.
A specimen to argue with
The booklet was the test. Set the face at real sizes, in real paragraphs, and the weak letters stop hiding.
Ligatures and oddities
The fi ligature and a drawn star, each at its own code point. Details like these are where a typeface stops being an alphabet and starts being a font.
The characters beyond the alphabet
Arrows, currency, punctuation and the at sign. The parts people only notice when they are missing.
The ampersand
The one glyph a type designer is allowed to enjoy, and the one an agency's letterhead uses most.
Set large
Display sizes are where the drawing has nowhere to hide, so that is where the specimen ends up.
2007
Eighteen years on, this is still the project that taught me the most about how type actually works.