Capitals — iconkind

The letters

The alphabet

Drawn, not licensed. 189 glyphs on a 100-unit cap height at weight 17: one stroke throughout, flat ends, geometric skeletons — the same hand as the marks, so the type belongs with the badges.

The lowercase is single-storey and built from the same circles: an “a” is a disc with a stem, b d p q are one bowl mirrored twice, and n m h r share one shoulder. Five shapes doing twenty-six jobs, which is why they sit together. The x-height is 72 of 100 — high, which is what keeps lowercase legible at a small size and in the same weight as the capitals.

The set

Every glyph

All 188 of them, one per cell, each sitting on its own baseline so the ascenders and descenders show. The rows underneath show how they behave together; this shows what exists — and a gap in a grid is visible in a way that a gap in a sentence is not.

In use

Sentences

An alphabet in rows tells you the shapes are right. Only a sentence tells you the SPACING is. Every letter is spaced from the shape of its sides — a straight stem needs more room than a round bowl, a diagonal needs least — and then the awkward PAIRS are kerned.

Kerning

Spacing gives each letter its own gap; kerning fixes the pairs where two shapes meet badly. The bar of a T overhangs air, so a T followed by an o leaves a hole no amount of good spacing can close. Each pair below is set twice — first without kerning, then with it. The pairs are not typed in by hand: they are measured from the outline of every letter against every other.

In colour

Every ink, and reversed

A specimen in one colour says nothing about the pair that matters. A card sets sage-deep on cream-deep and cream on coral; those are the two that have to work, so they are here beside the rest.

The wordmark

The scale

Four roles, one alphabet

A card chooses a ROLE and a PLACE, never a size. These are the four, at the size they are actually set on a 105x148mm card.

Why draw them

Three problems had one answer. CENTRING needs to know how wide a line is, and there is no font on the machine that builds this site to measure one — so borrowed type could only ever be set flush left. STRICT PDF/X wants every font embedded, and we cannot embed what we do not have. And the back of every card wanted a wordmark there was no logotype for.

Drawing the letters settles all three: we own the advance widths, so centring is arithmetic; there is no font to embed because there is no font; and ICONKIND set in these IS the wordmark. Not one file in the print pack uses a typeface — 13 cards and 52 stickers, and nothing in any of them for a preflight to object to.

It is a DISPLAY alphabet and says so: capitals, short lines, set large. Anything long or small would want a text face, and the honest answer there is to keep it off a card.