Making Kiln Sans Flex

Seven design problems that shaped our typeface, from inception to open source

Kiln Sans began as a logotype and grew, letter by letter, into a family used across every product we make.

Turning it into a variable font meant every weight had to agree with every other, all the way through the axes.

Every weight agrees

The hardest letter was the lowercase g: two storeys at heavy weights, one at light, and a believable path between them.

A typeface is a thousand small arguments, settled one glyph at a time.

The trouble with g

The family is now open source, with an optical-size axis so captions and billboards each get the shapes they need.