Fonts with Character

Kenn Munk, the author of Alternate Fonts and My type of hood, a native of Frederiksbjerg, Denmark, divulged that type designs are best described as systems or puzzles for the graphic designer to work out. “These puzzles have endless solutions, but you have to struggle with the fonts to get them to perform.

My dingbats are usually based on the user combining two or more 'characters' in order to get results, the typefaces usually feature connectors that allows the designer using them to build 'word images' rather than just rows of letters. I think a reason for this is that I grew up playing with LEGO bricks, plastic model kits and home made cardboard models”, he added.

This guy finds his inspiration through urban topography. He roams around and realized that he is fascinated with music, graffiti/street art, fonts in the restaurant. These are his inspiration in coming up with brilliant fonts with character.

One of his fonts was named 'Arkudius', after an imaginary Roman emperor, has no real baseline, characters are hanging from a line running along the x-height. Another attempt to bring dingbat and font closer together was a dingbat called 'Aether'. It was designed to go with 'Acetone' typeface which is a re-sampled script inspired by trip-hop music.

“I thought about the role silence, pauses and breaks play in music and wondered why we always express silence visually by putting blank space between words. Silence is much more than nothingness, it can be a look from someone you love, a sigh between words or taking a deep breath. Silence holds meaning and shouldn't necessarily be represented by blank space, so I designed the Acetone-companion 'Aether' for writing silence. The building block approach doesn't just apply to my dingbats. My typefaces usually feature connectors that bind the words together as blocks of letters, much like the way script-based fonts are bound together”, he explained.

‘Influenza’ his recently created font, was a break from the connected systems of building blocks. According to him, one of the reasons for this detour is that Influenza is based on a stripped down version of an earlier font. This stripping down ditched the connectors and gave him a new base to work from. 'Influenza ’ was released on September 1st. After that Influenza will be available through Myfoints.com same as the other fonts.

The Web site of Danish designer Kenn Munk is offering free fonts as well as fonts for sale. You can have more of these and Kenn Munk at http://www.kennmunk.com/