Inkwell
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How to use
Inkwell
An extended family of typefaces shaped by a common writing tool, Inkwell’s many voices are designed to give rise to new kinds of typographic relationships. First and foremost a text face, Inkwell includes the kinds of features and hierarchies that can help designers articulate even the most complex content.
Inkwell is a collection of families drawn in related styles, designed to invite more sophisticated relationships than just ‘roman and italic’ or ‘regular and bold.’ Each family contains the same six weights, from Thin to Black, their weights maintaining visually consistent intervals to ensure that every style has a heavier counterpart to provide the same degree of emphasis.
For every weight of Inkwell, the style that’s two steps heavier has sufficient visual contrast to serve as a boldface:
Use Inkwell’s italics to distinguish text without changing its weight:
To create contrasting textures, Inkwell offers not only the usual options of italics and small caps, but many more unexpected choices as well:
The capital and small cap swashes included in the Inkwell Serif romans make it possible to incrementally decorate the typography by degrees, slowly changing the tone from candid to special to fanciful:
Inkwell is designed to work at sizes both large and small, marrying the performance of a text face with the mannerisms of a pen. Like a text typeface, but unlike casual handwriting, its drawings include the kinds of visual accommodations necessary to overcome optical illusions in order to keep its forms clear at small sizes.
The following table offers some conservative guidelines for the smallest sizes at which the fonts can comfortably be reproduced and read, assuming typical reading conditions, and conventional contrast between type and background colors. The recommendations for sizes on screen are based on the coarser resolutions of older, entry-level monitors: at the higher resolutions available on modern phones, tablets, and laptops, type is viable at even smaller sizes.
Serif, Sans, & Script
Condensed
Open & Blackletter
Tuscan
Using progressively lighter weights of Inkwell as the type gets larger can help preserve the illusion that letters of different sizes are all drawn with the same pen. As a rule of thumb for Inkwell, try moving one weight lighter every time you double the size of the type, keeping in mind that smaller type always benefits from a little extra letterspacing, and a bump to its point size.
The roman capitals in Inkwell Serif can help quiet the family’s more elaborate lowercases, including its blackletter, its script, and the closely related Serif Italic:
Inkwell Open contains some of the family’s most versatile capitals, equally at home with serif and sans, roman and italic, and even the exotic blackletter and script:
Inkwell’s decorative Tuscan initials are a natural partner for the equally colorful blackletter, as well as the serif roman swash small caps. Try them with the family’s cursive lowercases as well, its script and serif italic:
Using the Inkwell Blackletter capitals, but the more modern lowercases of Inkwell Serif roman or italic, can add a touch of antiquity while maintaining ease of reading. Inkwell Serif’s roman small caps, with or without swashes, make equally good companions. Look for more unexpected pairings as well, such as the Inkwell Sans small caps, where a little extra letterspacing ensures the fonts’ solemnity.
Inkwell has five types of numbers: old-style figures for text, lining figures to accompany capitals, tabular figures for setting numbers in columns, fractions and fraction parts, and superscripts and subscripts.
Inkwell has features that make it easier to use tabular figures when designing data-heavy applications such as charts, tables, menus, and reports, as well as digital experiences that show dynamic data such as prices, statistics, product numbers, timetables, account numbers, points, or scores.
Many of Inkwell’s special characters and alternates are grouped into Stylistic Sets, an OpenType feature available in many applications that makes it easier to apply related substitutions together.
6.1Stylistic Sets
6.2Stylistic Sets Inkwell Serif
6.3Stylistic Sets Inkwell Sans
6.4Stylistic Sets Inkwell Script
6.5Stylistic Sets Inkwell Blackletter
6.6Stylistic Sets Inkwell Open
6.7Additional Characters
Inkwell automatically adjusts spacing and character choices to improve typography.
7.1Ligatures
Inkwell uses different strategies to address collisions between letters. In the Sans, Condensed, and Blackletter styles, ligatures for the combinations ff, ft, and tt are automatically substituted; the Script includes ligatures for fz, tz and Th; and the Serif Italic includes the ligatures ff, fi, fj, ffj, ffi, ffj, tt, and Th.
In the Serif, Sans, and Blackletter, collisions with ascenders are resolved by shortening the overhang of the lowercase f, and retracting any adjacent serifs, affecting the combinations fb, fh, fk, fl, ffb, ffh, ffk, and ffl.
In the Script, alternate versions of the letters o, f, and t are automatically introduced whenever cursive handwriting would naturally invite a longer stroke, improving the combinations ff, fff, fft, ft, ftt, of, ot, tf, tt, ttf, and ttt.
When letterspacing the lowercase, ligatures should be disabled.
7.2Rules and Arrows
Inkwell automatically joins multiple em dashes into extended rules, and connects hyphens to the less than and greater than symbols (<, >) to create arrows of any length.
7.3Kerning
Inkwell is spaced and kerned to perform in most circumstances without the need for manual intervention. In applications that offer multiple options for kerning type, always use the default kerning that’s native to the typefaces (labeled auto in Illustrator, and metrics in InDesign) — never use the setting for optical kerning.
So-called ‘optical kerning’ was originally developed as an automated assist for fonts that lack kerning. But applied to a professional typeface, it overrides the visual decisions made by the font’s designers, and instead spaces characters using a mathematical model. It routinely misjudges common pairs, ignores important context, and misaligns tabular figures, creating erratic and disruptive rhythms. Because its algorithms are subject to change with each software update, ‘optical kerning’ can cause text to be reflowed without notice.
Inkwell features H&Co’s Expanded Latin character set.
Inkwell supports 503 languages including Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Basque, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Cebuano, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Galician, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kurdish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgeois, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, Scots Gaelic, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Welsh, and Zulu.
