FF Mister K

The manuscripts of author Franz Kafka had such a profound impact on Finnish graphic and type designer Julia Sysmäläinen that she decided to convert his handwriting with its unusually strong calligraphic characteristics into a digital script. The philologist took on the challenge to transform in Kafka’s rather eccentric letter forms into an balanced typographic flow. This meant not only creating hundreds of ligatures, each of them consisting of two, three or even four single characters, but also integrating numerous alternate characters to avoid successions of repeating shapes, in order to lend FF Mister K a more authentic script feel. Furthermore handy OpenType functions were added, for example for stylistic alternatives including hatched text as well as underlining and crossing out.

Eventually three completely different single fonts were developed. Besides the normal cut there’s also Crossout, which allows for setting extensively crossed out text and Onstage, which clearly looks more extravagant and wriggly. FF Mister K is the only completely new design in the newest FontFont release 47 and is now online for sampling and download. It’s available in either a Standard OpenType or a Pro version with additional language support. FontShop.com’s advanced character set viewer reveals all the font’s 1,500 glyphs, including the hundreds of ligatures, stylistic alternates, underlines and scribbles.

NEW: FF Mister K Dingbats

While creating the letterforms for FF Mister K Julia Sysmäläinen was moved to sketch pictograms in the same personal, hand penned style. Her imagination (and digital ink) ran wild, resulting in nearly 600 images including animals, plants, stars, famous buildings, faces, food, flags, arrows, and various symbols for sports, hobbies, professions, traffic, and weather.

All the pictograms are available in a single font accessible via keycode or glyph palette.

• FontFeed
• FF Mister K Specimen
  
• FF Mister K Specimen 2
• Working With FF Mister K - NEW!!!
  
• Bigger images on Flickr
  
• FF Mister K on FontShop