Alkes: A Multi-Script Serif Family From Fontfabric That’s Out of This World
Based in Bulgaria, Fontfabric is a digital type foundry established by Svetoslav Simov in 2008. Drawn to lettering since his youth, his first taste of type design came in the form of graffiti art as a teenager. Interested in geometry, the mathematics behind the structure of letterforms held a particular interest – one that shaped his entire future.
Studying type design on his own, Svet’s early experience largely relied upon a mix of trial and error and the independent observation of existing typography examples as his guide. With time came more experience and his skillset broadened in tandem, with a strong emphasis on geometric sans serif design.
Eventually, Svet established Fontfabric as a way to merge his love for both lettering and geometry. Always in pursuit of absolute perfection, he and his entire team strive to produce the very best type families and each new release pushes the boundaries of artistry, functionality, and extensive versatility.
Fontfabric is particularly known for its inclusion of Cyrillic characters, due to the foundry’s roots and the rich typographical history of its home country of Bulgaria, where the Cyrillic alphabet was born. That alphabet remains one of importance for millions of people throughout the region and beyond, and Fontfabric regularly incorporates Cyrillic accessibility in its font families.
One of Fontfabric’s more recent releases through YouWorkForThem is Alkes, designed by Kaja S?ojewska and Plamen Motev. Inspired by the cosmos, this multi-script serif family was actually named after a star, traveling “a long way from a graduation project to a published” type family.
Alkes was designed with the intention of bringing a visual harmony to three separate scripts — Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin. This humanist type family manages to combine the best of the analog and digital worlds, resulting in a type family that is traditional and contemporary at the same time, and one that offers unmatched flexibility in the digital design workspace.
A generous x-height, wide letter spacing, angled stress contrast, and expressive large open counters lend a warmth to the Alkes family while improving the reading experience in long-form text. The subdued calligraphic structure and asymmetrical serifs create make Alkes a particularly gorgeous choice for editorial and publishing use.
Available in Thin, Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold, ExtraBold, Black, with corresponding italics for each, Alkes is beautifully suited to headlines and editorials, magazines, advertising, logo designs, product packaging and informational inserts, merchandise, marketing materials, displays, signage, website designs, mobile applications, print and digital publishing, branding and identity projects.
With more than 1200 glyphs, Alkes is absolutely packed with additional OpenType features that include capitals to small caps, case-sensitive forms, fractions, standard ligatures, discretionary ligatures, ordinals, subscript, superscript, scientific inferiors, slashed zero, tabular figures, oldstyle figures, small caps, contextual alternates, and stylistic alternates for incredible versatility. This type family extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Afrikaans, Basic Greek, and in true Fontfabric fashion, Basic Cyrillic for design projects intended for a wide, international audience.
Fontfabric currently offers 50 products through YouWorkForThem, providing a varied range of serif, sans serif, slab serif, script, and display fonts for design projects of all kinds. Visit their portfolio to take a look at the rest of their work so far and bookmark it so you won’t miss out on their new releases as they arrive!
