kabels and kepler

Getting towards the middle of the alphabet is proving a bit tricky with this little series - hence my failure to keep to my two-weekly schedule. And I'm sure I'm not alone in not having very Ks in my font book aside from Kai and Kufi. Which is when I have to start searching around. But the joy in this is either rediscovering fonts that I might sometime have used (or thought of using), or discovering something entirely new. Such is the case with the Ks.

And Kabel is the one that I might once have thought of using, though I never have. The first cuts of Kabel appeared in 1927, released by the German foundry Gebr. Klingspor, and designed by Rudolf Koch. Like many of Koch's typefaces, Kabel is carefully constructed and drawn. The basic forms were influenced by ancient Roman stone-carved letters, which consisted of just a few pure and clear geometric forms, such as circles, squares, and triangles. Koch also infused Kabel with some elements of Art Deco, making it appear quite different from other geometric modernist typefaces from the 1920s, like Futura.

Linotype has two versions of Kabel in its library. Kabel has a shorter x-height, with longer ascenders and descenders, making it a bit truer to Koch's original design than the second version, ITC Kabel, which was designed by Victor Caruso. This version, also known in the United States as Cable, has a larger x-height, shorter ascenders and descenders, more weights, and a diamond shaped i-dot.

The second K, Kepler, is a new one for me. Designed by Robert Slimbach in 2003, it comes in more weights and variations than you could shake a stick at.