Kari Display is the product of a long standing idea I had to give the well-received Positype typeface, Kari, plastic surgery. Just referring to giving a typeface plastic surgery, or letter lipo, stuck in the back of my head until I was able to pick the project up.
The ultimate objective was to refine Kari Display to a point where each glyph was expressed as simple as possible… and in that simplicity a sexiness would appear. Kari is a beautiful script, but it is very ‘controlled’ and orderly and I wanted Kari Display to break that mold with much more movement, curviness, greater modulation and a more elegant feel on the page. I did not want to take it too far, limiting the use of the typeface, but rather opted for a delicate balance of thick and thin against the added movement of the glyphs.
The wealth of sketches and proposed variants during the concepting phase was encouraging and I really pushed to add as many alternate characters, ligatures, swashes (and more) as I possibly could. Just about every character has at least one or more alternates AND the complete offering of alternates completely covers a wide range of Latin-based language groups including Central European diacritics.
