Kaybe Serif

A dramatic entrance. Playwrights love it. They know you never get a second chance to make a first impression. In theater, it’s the easy road to introduce a character into the play. In design, it’s the most memorable way to establish a brand. As a director, you need to cast an actor who has mastered the art of the dramatic entrance. As a typographer, you need to pick a font that spearheads your design with the right voice. Such as Kaybe Serif—a typeface that enters with sense and sensibility, expressing both wisdom and charisma.

Kaybe Serif gets attention without sacrificing elegance or emotion. This font family is a modern interpretation of the transitional serif genre for titles and headlines, cast into contemporary harmonized proportions. It has more stroke contrast than an old-style face but appears less flashy than a didone. The gently curved details are best enjoyed large, while the traditional skeleton of Kaybe Serif ensures that the typeface is pleasant to read in short copy, too. Its hallmark: true italic styles that offer a vast array of swash capitals and discretionary ligatures—for an eye-catching first impression.

Instead of focusing on economical considerations, the main purpose of Kaybe Serif is to vest words with style, so its x-height is relatively small, as is the case in classic typefaces. Like those, it is well suited to printed matter. The fine joints and delicate bracketed serifs account for ink spread in medium and text sizes.

A purely contemporary design not based on an particular model from the past, Kaybe Serif is a rewarding choice when you want the vintage elegance of a Baskerville-like face without the historical baggage.

Kaybe Serif’s character set consists of 646 glyphs for the uprights and 766 glyphs for the italic styles, with more than a hundred extra swash alternates in the latter (including letters with diacritics). It comes with OpenType features such as 11 figure sets (including boxed and circled ones, both positive and negative), up to 20+ discretionary ligatures depending on weight and style, localized forms, and more. The static weights available in the font family are Regular, Medium, Bold, and Black. Going for the real “twirly” Kaybe look? Activate Stylistic Set 1 in the italic styles and turn any capital letter into a luxuriant swash initial.

A refined design like Kaybe Serif is at its strongest whenever smartness, emotion, sophistication, luxury, arts, and culture come into play—where tradition meets progress. There’s no need for type-casting, though: Like any great actor, Kaybe Serif can play more than one role. Its literary appearance lends itself to banking, real estate, law, publishing, consulting, and professional services. Its “sweet” side with swashes and discretionary ligatures performs brilliantly in packaging, cosmetics and fragrances, retail services, the spa and hotel business, fashion, correspondence, entertainment (especially gaming and film-making), and social media.

To Shakespeare, all the world’s a stage. To designers, all the world’s a page, and all the fonts and pictures merely players. A good director will cast the right players for the job. A good typographer will choose the right fonts. If you’re looking for one that moves effortlessly between poise, passion, elegance, and gravitas, we’re confident Kaybe Serif will be just the face for a dramatic entrance.