Since last month – Jürgen already men­tioned this – I can prac­tise my pas­sion for type as mar­ket­ing man­ager of the Font­Font library. It is self-​evident that I will pri­mar­ily deal with new devel­op­ments. How­ever the upcom­ing Font­Font release proves that this does not exclude the pub­li­ca­tion of arti­cles with a his­tor­i­cal back­ground.

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 Pro 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. All for­eign lan­guages and fea­tures included the stan­dard cut alone con­tains more than 1,500 glyphs.

Graphic designer Oili Kokko­nen, also orig­i­nat­ing from Fin­land, proves that one can com­pose very witty illus­tra­tions with the FF Mister K Pro char­ac­ters. Pic­tograms for toi­lets, Sahti Insti­tute of Design.

FF Mister K Pro is the only com­pletely new design in the upcom­ing Font­Font release 47, and will soon be avail­able from FontShop (ten­ta­tive release date Decem­ber 1st). Mean­while, to atten­u­ate the wait­ing a down­load­able PDF has been made avail­able to anyone interested.

Update: Dec. 17, 2008 — FF Mister K 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 1500 glyphs, includ­ing the hun­dreds of lig­a­tures, styl­is­tic alter­nates, under­lines and scribbles.