Koning Display’s fonts include 31 different OpenType features, including ligatures, stylistic sets, and case-sensitive alternates. In Dutch, a j with an acute appears after the i with an acute. For Moldavian and Romanian, the cedilla-shaped diacritic is replaced by a form that looks like a comma. The same is true for the : ! and ? characters. So, full spaces between double chevrons and words are reduced to a narrow space in French text. So we built that in, as always the French take this so far that they type full spaces in around such glyphs – which, even for French typographic standards, is too much. Periods and commas follow the rhythmic spacing of characters, but things like : ! ? « » read better when they have some extra space between the letters. In general, the various international ways of using quotes in text needs special attention. ![]() Two examples: the strong kerning between the apostrophe and the A is reduced when these follow an L the kerning between a period and an ordinal is reduced when they are preceded by the numeral 7. Narrow glyphs, kerned on both sides might provoke the neighbors crashing into each other. It is not just glyph pairs that have been kerned in Koning Display! Some rare language situations require that glyph triplets get extra treatment. The smaller the size, the more tracking is needed. The regular weights of Koning Display work astonishingly well in small sizes when tracking is applied to add some spacing. The distinctive swelling of thin stems might seem like a purely decorative decision, but it is actually a means of color control, it fills up spaces inside letters, making the overall texture of a text more even. Special techniques were used to keep the size of the kerning data small, to facilitate a smooth webfont experience. Therefore, Koning Display has quite a few kerning pairs. In a display font, everything is more compact differences in distances between punctuation and letter shapes become very obvious and need pair-specific adjustments. For a text font, the focus would be more on the rhythm of white spaces inside and between the letters, and all punctuation is to be spaced with more air. Since Koning Display is a display design – the intended size range is right there in the name – the emphasis when spacing and kerning its letterforms was on achieving equal distances between shapes. This helps in the overall spacing of the typeface because it allows the font’s default spacing to be compact. In Koning Display’s Black weight, the counters inside of letters are small. ![]() We are eager for our customers to tell us themselves. Type designers sometimes tell graphic designers what a typeface is for, but Koning is not like that. It was not developed for branding on the cosmetics market, either – even though we think it could tackle that kind of application well. This is important because Koning is not specifically intended to be a typeface for editorial design work, for instance, like Floris and Spiegel Sans are. That is everyday work anyway: custom-type clients come to him because they need something specific Luc(as) is the best font developer who can deliver that for them. Luc(as) wants to make graphic designers’ jobs easier, but his fonts are not all drawn with a specific area of use in mind. ![]() This animation shows how Luc(as) can control the contrast in the interpolated weight without changing the design of the masters. We even invented new constructions to fine-tune contrast in interpolated weights. Time and many revisions allow typefaces to ripen. Named after the Dutch word for “king,” the design was an in-house side project we revisited over and over again for about a decade-and-a-half. We released Koning Display in November 2019. The wide range of weights and styles shipping as part of the Koning Display family can be seen in this sample above. We are grateful that our efforts have been recognized with numerous awards: TDC Certificate of Typographic Excellence and Award of Excellence from Communication Arts both in 2018, and Gold from German Design Awards in 2020. We gained a lot of knowledge working on those projects, and we have funnelled that technical know-how into our library’s newest typeface: Koning Display. In the last few decades, LucasFonts has developed specialized custom font solutions for all sorts of clients: from newspapers and television stations to pushing the boundaries for electronic companies and several automobile manufacturers from transparent PNG fonts to variable fonts, for which we built tools first.
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