The basis for the Koorkin typeface family was a custom font proposal gone awry. "Many years ago I worked on a typeface to brand a new product," recalls George Ryan, Koorkin's designer. "The design request, however, was withdrawn before I got much done on the face. I don't think the product ever saw the light of day," he continues. "As, I normally do, I saved my sketches. When I recently stumbled on them by accident 10 years later, I remembered there was a lot about the design I liked."

Ryan first quickly drew the letters for Koorkin with a felt-tip marker, ensuring that shapes were free-flowing and spontaneous. The result is a playful, full-bodied handwriting script with fluid forms and bold proportions. Koorkin is a delightful confectionery of a typeface design, awash with swashes and deliciously long ascenders and descenders. While strokes are virtually monotone in weight, an ample x-height combined with generous counters guarantees that, even though a handwriting script, Koorkin ranks high on the legibility scale.

To give the design added character, Ryan also created a suite of swash and alternate characters that are available in OpenType format. "I added many ligatures and alternate versions of key characters to the character set," says Ryan. "For instance, a word with an 'ee' combination can take advantage of a ligature I designed rather than using two of the same e's to do the job. As a result, a word such as 'breeze' will have three slightly different e's in it – making the copy look truly handwritten."

With all this personality, Koorkin is at home in such diverse places as posters, restaurant menus, social announcements and product brochures.

The complete Koorkin family is available as desktop fonts from the Fonts.com, Linotype.com and ITCFonts.com websites. It is also available as dynamically downloadable Web fonts.

click here to purchase the fonts.

Allan Haley is Director of Words & Letters at Monotype Imaging. Here he is responsible for strategic planning and creative implementation of just about everything related to typeface designs.