The Making of Kyrios

Kyrios is a curious, slightly psychedelic blackletter type family, available in a variety of optical sizes and weights.

It’s a 15-style font family, available in static and variable font formats. It includes extensive sets of glyph alternates, with an extended Latin character set, supporting languages across Western and Central Europe, plus Vietnamese.

By the way: I pronounce the name as either “curious” or “kier-ee-ose.” It comes from the Greek phrase “Kyrie Eleison,” or “Lord, have mercy,” a phrase found on the grave monument that inspired the project. Greek designers have told me my pronunciation is roughly okay, but I welcome any alternative opinions!

At heart, Kyrios is a blackletter family, but it brings a few twists. Many blackletter fonts stick so closely to historical models that they're sometimes illegible to modern readers. Kyrios maintains a distinctly blackletter aesthetic but adopts more modern letterforms where they improve readability. It also packs a lot of alternate glyphs. This allows fine-tuned control, so it can be either slightly mysterious or quite direct. And, perhaps most importantly, Kyrios eschews the spiky, sharp shaping of most blackletter fonts, and delivers forms that are distinctly soft and slightly “goopy.”

Some of Kyrios’s readability-enhancing alternates are assigned by default to Text styles, in static and variable fonts. For example, at Standard and Display sizes, letters such as “a” and “g” are closed loops, while at Text sizes, they take on more modern, familiar forms.

But let’s back up and take a look at the broader story of Kyrios.

Project Origins

In 2017, I was sketching a lot of font ideas during my time at TypeMedia. One that dawned on me as a half-joke was “Cooper Black…letter,” or an Oz Cooper-esque approach to blackletter forms. Cooper Black is an all-time-great typeface, beloved for its soft corners and inky, playful feel. Meanwhile, blackletter is a personal favorite genre of letters, and they are a relatively underexplored area of modern type design. Somewhat surprisingly, Cooper’s underlying structure is a very traditional Roman style, as seen in work from printers like Nicolas Jenson (circa 1470), with visible stroke contrast and shapes derived from a flat-nibbed pen, as used in the calligraphy of manuscripts. By that same logic, it might make a lot of sense to convert another traditional, flat-nibbed writing style to gain the bulbous, soft treatment of Cooper. Of course, there would also be the irony that blackletter styles are often used to portray a sense of darkness and edginess, in stark contrast to the buoyant optimism that goopy fonts (like Cooper Black) tend to exude.

Frustratingly, I can’t find any actual sketches of my “Cooper Blackletter” idea from the time. But, I was drawing a lot of blackletter, and I was exploring Cooper as a base for various offshoots. My favorite such exploration was one I drew during the Arabic type design course run by Kristyan Sarkis, as an idea for a “Cooper Black Arabic.“ The following drawing is my (beginner) attempt to draw “Cooper Black Falafel” in Arabic. (Admittedly, it’s a silly phrase. I never know what words to write when sketching a font idea, particularly in an unfamiliar language, and falafel was a major component of my student diet). Arabic script, similar to blackletter, tends to have a strong visual tie to handwritten forms and stroke contrast – so it was a fairly natural match for the aesthetics of Cooper Black.

A few years later, I felt a mix of dismay and delight when I saw a Twitter post from Matthijs Herzberg showing he was already well into realizing a beautiful execution of the same premise. Literally, his caption was: “WIP ‘cooper blackletter’ (not the actual name).” Matthijs’s project went on to be released as the amazing Schmaltzy, and Matthijs became one of my favorite type designers.

Still, I couldn’t quite get the idea of a “goopy blackletter” out of my head, and during frequent 2020–21 pandemic walks through a nearby cemetery, I came across an artifact of old lettering that sparked a related but new direction.

I owe a lot to Schmaltzy and to Matthijs for inspiring me to seriously pursue Kyrios as a project. In addition to both families being soft blackletter fonts, the specific way Kyrios subverts an Optical Size axis to control widths is inspired in part by the width-controlling-weight axis of Schmaltzy, along with similar weight axes in families like DJR’s Job Clarendon and Hoefler’s Champion Gothic.

An Underground Encounter

Kyrios is inspired by a monument in Green-Wood Cemetery of Brooklyn, NY. This tombstone is for Mary Cooke, buried October 14, 1890. This monument features a distinctive mixture of Lombardic caps and blackletter lowercase, all in strikingly condensed proportions, with edges and corners softened by both design and time.

Why find inspiration in a cemetery? Some readers might find it macabre to make fonts based on gravestone lettering. After all, I’ve also made Lang and Lang Gothic, pulling from similar sources! At this point, I am probably at risk of seeming like I’m only interested in cemetery-inspired letters, which is not my intention for ArrowType.

However, finding inspiration in cemeteries comes mostly from a simple appreciation of beauty. In New York City, cemeteries are some of the most serene, green, and full-of-life places you can find. They function not only as cemeteries, but also as parks, arboretums, and wildlife sanctuaries. Additionally, remaking old letters from a cemetery is much like remaking letters from any historical source, whether ancient architecture, artifacts in a museum, or an old book. These are all sources with which type designers can reconnect with artists and artisans of the past, and bring some of their knowledge and creativity into the present. Of course, if modern designers find my fonts fitting for expressing dark moods, that is cool, too! Still, letters can have many purposes, and a particular source of inspiration needn’t determine a font’s broader utility.

In Kyrios and in its inspiration, I see many letterforms as “psychedelic” because their swoops and swashes remind me of the twisting, space-filling letters of psychedelic poster artists like Victor Moscoso and Wes Wilson. If we wanted to tie a tangential historical thread, the Mary Cooke monument is perhaps an example of the American Arts and Crafts movement, which later became the Art Nouveau movement, which in turn inspired the psychedelic art of the 1960s and 1970s. In a visual sense, there is simply an inextricable link in the way these letters play with form and counterform and sit near the edge of illegibility. Rather than existing only to deliver a message transparently, these forms exist to catch the reader’s eye and provide a momentary game. (“Wait, what even are those letters??”)

Many of these letters use forms that are subtle twists on more common forms. Most Lombardic capitals have curvy shapes and avoid straight diagonals. Meanwhile, Mary Cooke’s monument includes several diagonal characters that take on a form that makes me think of the Roman numerals you might see on a clock face, with straight sides and connected flat portions at their tops and bottoms.

The blackletter lowercase, meanwhile, is a surprising mix of calligraphy and constructed geometry. Letters like ‘n’ and ‘m’ have almost fully circular, symmetrical tops of their counters – reminding me of my own approach to Name Sans. These are paired with more angular letters (like ‘o’) that have a basis in a charmingly simple parallelogram. To top it all off, there are flamboyant interior swashes in the ‘e’, ‘r’, ‘s’, and ‘u/v’, which helped the lowercase to pair perfectly with their Lombardic cap counterparts.

I was smitten. These harmonious juxtapositions are exactly the kind of moves that really light me up about good lettering. I knew this was something I had to try to build into a modern font – and maybe even my very own “Cooper Blackletter.” But how can an exciting sample like this be adapted into a full, modern, useful, and beautiful type family?

“But wait!” you might be thinking – “Why would you have to make sketches if the shapes are already there to copy?” However, simply tracing the general forms of found lettering doesn’t usually result in a digital font that looks very good. If you do try to trace what you can from a photograph, you might get something useful for the odd display purpose, but it rarely results in something beautiful and versatile as a font.

For example, if we start by tracing one of the words, aiming to clean up relative letter sizing as little as reasonably possible…

…And then we apply that same overall sizing to another photographed word…

We can use a design tool call Word-o-Mat to create test words from the traced letters. And… this sample may have its merits, but it falls far short of the sophistication and beauty of the original inspiration. It also isn’t very easy or pleasant to read!

But why doesn’t direct tracing work?

When we see a piece of physical lettering like a pencil sketch, a printed sign, or a carved inscription, we can appreciate a three-dimensional object, and our eyes and brains smooth out the curves and fill in the gaps when we conceive of it as a two-dimensional design. However, when those same letters are traced in hard black-and-white Bézier curves, our eyes see those unambiguous digital shapes for exactly what they are, and any inconsistencies, unsmooth curves, or strange design choices really jump out.

Therefore, to do justice to physical letters with a digital font, the designer must take a great deal of care to draw forms as near to perfect as the observer can interpret in the physical forms.

Beyond the basic shapes considered on a letter-by-letter basis, lettering exists for a very specific, single application, with a single, fixed sequence of letters. A font, by contrast, must work for any text sequence, and is usually most useful if it can flex and adapt to many contexts. A simple reason direct tracing can fail is that letter spacing that looks good in one context (such as letters cut into stone) may be far too wide in another (such as the headline for a news article).

To be fair, however, you can either trace letters naïvely, or you can trace them with some discernment. One of my earliest attempts to draw Kyrios actually was to place a photo into a font editor (RoboFont) and draw right on top of it – but with care to make outlines that were a little more regularized and refined.

As usual, my early digital drawing was paired with time spent sketching ideas on paper. This helped me uncover the core of the design and how to translate it into something that held up to my ideas of what makes good typography.

Another early process (which continued right through to Version 1.0) was determining specific letter shapes that would stay true to the original inspiration while working well in a font.

The forms of “Y” and “K” from the monument are beautiful, but they include large negative spaces which I found looked a little odd in all-caps text. Similarly, the original forms of “C” and “E” have rightward swoops that look great with sufficient letter spacing, but which caused unsightly gaps in the tighter spacing that made sense for Kyrios.

I also wanted letters like “x” and “z” to be easily recognizable to modern readers, so I eschewed the more historical models exhibited in this and similar monuments. (However, Kyrios does have Stylistic Set 6, which activates more traditional and decorative forms of such characters).

Through physical and digital drawing, Kyrios took shape. It has no sharp corners anywhere (even though this is a significant challenge to produce in a variable font). It retains the flavor of its Lombardic and blackletter inspiration while offering better legibility and tighter spacing for a modern look. It borrows the blend of organic and geometric shapes from the original and, of course, mirrors the tall, condensed proportions that make the inscription so eye-catching.

Additional dimensions: Optical Size and Weight axes

Beyond basic outline refinement, Kyrios required further adaptation. My first attempts were to draw it with the same stroke contrast (the relative thickness of thick and thin strokes) found in the physical carving. But I very quickly realized those specific relationships only really work at large scale, with the help of dimensionality and shadow. On a screen, at anywhere near normal display font sizes (say, 48–96pt), the closely traced forms were too delicate, too fussy, and failed to properly translate the energy I was drawn to.

So, I made new versions with lower contrast between thick and thin strokes, and I softened the corners to better reflect my perception of the original, in ways that might translate at 48px on screen.

This set me in an interesting direction. I had already adapted this inspiration to work at a medium scale… But how might it work at a much smaller text size, around 12px? This kind of dimension of stylistic adaptation is what type designers call “optical size.” Kyrios's root style has three main parameters: condensed proportions, soft corners, and slightly ornate blackletter and Lombardic shapes. To work at text scale, it needed to be less condensed, softer, and less complex overall.

So, these considerations set the Optical Size range of Kyrios. The base style is Kyrios Display Regular. Standard Regular is slightly wider and a bit thicker, for better readability in small-to-medium sizes. For Text Regular, the letter proportions grow even wider, and it gains more generous letter spacing. To ensure legibility, many of its glyphs swap into simplified forms. Finally, to keep the softness in smaller sizes, Kyrios Text also becomes sturdier (lower-contrast) and more “goopy” (corner radii are relatively larger). As a result, the most “Cooper Black” style in this family is Kyrios Text Ultra.

This approach to optical size was a solid basis for a compelling type family. However, as a designer with a background in branding and UI design, I always feel like a single-weight typeface is limited in its utility – font weights are just so helpful in establishing typographic hierarchy. But how could Kyrios be given a weight range?

As a type designer, I came into this project with more background knowledge on the design logic of sans-serif typefaces than blackletter scripts. How can you add weight to a blackletter project? For anyone with some experience in calligraphy, the basic answer is obvious: blackletter writing is done with flat-nibbed pens, and in such writing, bolder weights would naturally be the result of wider pen nibs.

To approximate this pen-width effect, I used some Python scripting to duplicate each glyph of Kyrios Regular and shift it up and to the right. Rather than keep this experiment in an abstract form, I turned this idea into a working variable font, so I could test the right amount of X and Y shifting across the range of optical size, and find an appropriate amount of spacing for these bolder styles.

(By the way, you can see a longer version of the weight animation on the ArrowType Instagram.)

After finding the right general levels of boldness, drawing the weight range meant tracing over these shifted outlines and fixing a lot of issues. Prototyping helped me work with confidence, but drawing a super-bold font will always require a lot of choices to compensate for a basic lack of space. Not all strokes can be equally thickened, so it was once again accomplished by a process of drawing to produce a certain overall impact, rather than being able to follow a straightforward logic.

(By the way: if you’d like to prototype weight this way in your own font, I shared my script: you can find prep-faux-bold.py on GitHub.)

A unique aspect of Kyrios is that I recorded and published several work sessions along the way on my YouTube channel (arrowtype). For example, here’s a video of me drawing bold weights of Kyrios after the prototyping stage.

Features

When I make a new font, I try to remember how the average font user might feel about how it works. As a graphic designer, it's pretty common to find a font that is mostly appealing for a project… But then it has some weird design decision that is a total deal-breaker.

Well, in Kyrios, that “deal-breaker” might be the weird mix of Lombardic capitals, blackletter lowercase, and relatively normal numerals. But! In Kyrios, you have options.

I highlighted these options earlier in the article, but to add one more aspect: the Stylistic Sets are also great in all-caps typesetting. It’s a bit like having three or four font families in one!

In Kyrios, due to its specific inspiration, the default uppercase letters take a Lombardic form. This style dates back to decorative capital letters used in illuminated manuscripts from Italy and Western Europe around the 15th and 16th centuries. In those handwritten books, Lombardic capitals decorated the starts of paragraphs and sections, followed by smaller blackletter text. This aesthetic carried into religious and monumental architecture, eventually appearing in gravestones like Mary Cooke's.

But *then, *whoever created the letters for Mary Cooke’s monument didn’t simply use typical Lombardic caps. Traditionally, Lombardic caps have curvy forms for diagonal letters like A, W, and V. For Mary Cooke, the A takes a surprising but very fun, almost “Roman Numeral” form, like a traffic cone. (And as a novice skateboarder, I have a special love of the traffic cone as an ollie training obstacle.)

But, graphic designers may end up wanting uppercase letters that are less showy. Even when making my own promo materials for Kyrios, I often wanted caps and numerals that fit the lowercase, or still kept the blackletter look in all-caps text.

So, as a type designer faced with multiple sources of inspiration, plus the knowledge that designers might want something more straightforward, I decided to navigate a path that fulfills many potential options. Kyrios has *four *sets of uppercase letters.

1. Default: Lombardic caps, with triangular diagonals (with a few higher-legibility alts that appear in Text optical sizes)

2. Stylistic Set 1: Blackletter caps & numerals

3. Stylistic Set 2: Roman caps, because some are already there for Text styles, and because they look nice

4. Stylistic Set 3: Lombardic caps, with curvier, more traditional forms

A slight irony is that I began this project thinking it might be a very simple, one-style, straightforward display font. But once you fall in love with a project, it can be hard not to explore threads of curiosity. Was it “efficient,” in some rational, business sense, to include all these features? Definitely not, but I’m glad I made it work! Flexible type families can offer real utility to graphic designers who care about the details of their work, so I’m happy when I can put in the extra time to make something with a rich set of options.

Kyrios is made for fun.

Most of the business end of type design is in making fonts that are business-friendly, as it can be a bigger payday when a large company licenses or commissions a custom version of a type family. Kyrios has all the rigor and language support of a business-ready font, but I don’t expect large corporations to base their visual identities on a quirky blackletter font.

Still, part of what typography fans love about letters is the sheer diversity of possibilities. There are only a small number of Latin-script letters, and they all need roughly the same shapes, in every font, to be legible. An “A” must be recognizable as an “A,” or it’s not much of an “A.” And yet, it is still possible to make something new and surprising – especially if you come across something old and surprising! So, while it is financially important to almost any type designer to support serious typography, it is just as important to *me *to support… curious typography! Kyrios is crafted with love to support projects like games, gig posters, holiday parties, small-batch food packaging, and more.

Thank you!

Thanks to everyone who has supported the project along the way, especially through licensing early versions on Future Fonts and on my website. Thanks to everyone who has used Kyrios, and thanks to everyone who has shared the things they’ve made, given feedback on the typeface, or simply shared my occasional Instagram posts.

Thank you for reading!

You can learn more about Kyrios, try it out, download trial fonts, and buy licensing for it on the AT Kyrios product page.

Kyrios is also available via Adobe Fonts, where you can sync it as part of an Adobe CC subscription. (And please do sync it if you can, even just to try it out! Each sync supports ArrowType, too.)

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