Imagine being printer in the early nineteenth century, your stock isn’t the finest, your lead characters are worn out: Voilá Kandidat Rough.
But wait, Kandidat isn’t the usual scan-an-old-book,-put-the-glyphs-in-a-font-and-you’re-done-font. Kandidat Rough has a variety of whopping 14 alternates for most characters. Our algorithm changes the letters automatically. All you have to do is turn on Contextual Alternates in your layout app. The algorithm is the best we’ve seen so far, and it’s so good that even same words appear in different forms. And should by coincidence words have the same glyphs, just assign a different Style Set to the first letter, and all other letters in the word will change as well (well, it depends a bit on your software). The mechanism isn’t perfect and maybe we stretched OpenType capabilities a bit over the top, but we yet haven’t seen any better routine for switching letters on the fly.
Is it worth to mention that Kandidat Rough not only speaks English, but also German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Croatian, Turkish and most likely some other languages? Maybe. To be sure whether your language is supported, this is the typeset of all letters: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝĆČĐĞ݌ފŸŽ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïñòóôõöøùúûüýÿćčđğıœşšž
Apart from that we also included the following punctuation and currency symbols:
!"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]_{|}¡©«®°±¶·»¿×–—‘’‚“”„†•…‹›⁄≠☞ €¢$£¥
This sums up to nearly 3000 glyphs per font, and we have three of them: Regular, Italic and Bold. All neatly kerned.
All in all a great repertoire for even the most demanding book or advert jobs with a look of old times.
And now imagine you are sick of the rugged print experience Kandidat Rough delivers: go for Kandidat. This is our Scotch-ish ancestor the Rough version was made from. A sturdy, friendly, round, warm friend from the beginning of the nineteenth century. A bit dark, maybe. You will like it.
Kandidat has the aforementioned type set plus complete Baltics, Eastern Europe and Cyrillic. Plus a couple of gimmicks like fleurons, stars, circled numbers, arrows, and, and, and… Kandidat Regular additionally has small caps for Latin based scripts (not Cyrillic). The spick and span Kandidat font set also consists of Regular, Italic and Bold cuts. The bold cut is on the very bold side and can nicely be used for headings, whereas Italic is a great companion for Regular.
It took us some time and trouble to finish this project, but after all we are very proud of our little feat and hope you will enjoy Kandidat as much as we do.
Enjoy!
