Introducing Klei

Klei

Our wedding anniversary falls on February 14th, which makes our Valentine’s Day way more special than your usual Hallmark holiday. Three years ago, I hand drew Alisa’s name for a Valentine’s card with the promise of designing a typeface for her based on those five little characters. And that is how Klei came into being. Born from this simple type treatment, on this simple card, came hundreds more glyphs, diacritics, in different weights, that together, make up this marvelous type face.

Now we are incredibly proud to freely share Klei with the world. There is still a lot of work to be done on on Klei. At the time of writing this, there are still no Greek or Cyrillic characters. We really want to make more weights available and refine all the cases even further. It is meant to eventually become a very utilitarian, easy to read, expert book font for everyone to use, share, and create with.

Our hope is that this font will fill a very real need for a well drawn and complete SIL licensed classic typeface. We are so excited to see it evolve and to see it in use on many beautiful projects. Drawing Klei has been nothing but admiration and love for the art of typography; and of course, my true love, my darling wife Alisa.

If you get a chance to use Klei, please do share your work with us. We’d love to see what you create with her.

Klei is freely available for download at: https://github.com/Rocketroom/klei

Klei is licensed under the SIL Open Font License.

Introducing Klei by Joseph Steck is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.