The Northern Block has certainly carved out a name for itself in the world of type design. Established by Jonathan Hill in 2006, the design studio prides itself on offering high quality products that celebrate style and versatility, while promoting a work atmosphere that prizes collaboration and teamwork. The Northern Block holds innovation and artistry in the highest regard, and their work continually proves that individuality and artistic expression are things that should be cherished, and encouraged.
One of their more recent releases is Karlo, designed by Sofie Beier. Sofie is an accomplished typographer from Denmark with a rich understanding of typography and legibility as an actual science. In fact, she even wrote a book about it; “Reading Letters: Designing For Legibility” covers the topic in extensive detail. “I see type design as the most extreme of design disciplines,” Sofie told us. “What I like is that it simultaneously is about the detail and about the whole. I love the simplicity of working with the harmony of the black and white and to work just as much on the character as on the shape surrounding it.”
With Karlo, Sofie found her inspiration in the calligraphy of Edward Johnston, a man whose work demonstrated that a simple broad nib pen was capable of producing a range of different writing styles. She mimicked those styles in digital form, crafting Karlo’s letter sets after Johnston’s own pen use. For instance, Karlo Serif Bold and Karlo Sans Bold carry themselves with a humanistic low stroke contrast, while Karlo Open features a high stroke contrast reminiscent of 19th century jobbing typefaces.
Karlo is named after a typical guy with the same name in Denmark, a fellow who would probably make his way through the world only after putting a considerable amount of effort into his outward appearance. “He is a handyman who can do a bit of this and that when needed. He is a happy go lucky kind of guy that takes one day at a time. To me, the typeface family has some of the same qualities,” Sofie said.
Karlo features its Serif and Sans lettersets in weights that include ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, and Bold, with corresponding italics for each. Designed to be both friendly and somewhat informal, Karlo Serif and Sans are both excellent choices for a variety of design projects, including headlines, editorials, advertising, web copy, publishing, corporate communications, presentations, infographics, product packaging, displays, signage, logos, branding, and identity.
Karlo Open explores Johnston’s own demonstration of how a broad nib pen actually works. He made the suggestion of fastening two sharpened pencils together and writing with them to witness the mechanics behind writing with a broad nib pen. In his demonstration, the tip of each pencil represented the edge of the pen, and Sofie’s translation of that experiment in digital form has resulted in a beautifully unique and airy display type available in Regular and Italic.
The Karlo family of fonts offers additional features that include numerators, denominators, fractions, tabular figures, and oldstyle figures. Its multilingual support extends to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, and Pan African Latin for global accessibility.
The Northern Block currently offers almost 100 products through YouWorkForThem, an impressive array of serifs, sans serifs, scripts, and display fonts to suit a wide variety of graphic design projects. Visit their extensive portfolio to check out the rest of their work and bookmark it so you won’t miss any of their future additions!
