Ida Tikhonova

Klothilde is a handwriting font which came to life in one of my doodling sessions (I must admit I still doodle with pen and paper). The idea was to create a font which resembles writing with a quill on paper with exaggerated ball terminals. Sometimes there is too much ink which makes the letters fat and the strokes uneven. The paper soaks the ink resulting in blurred line crossings. The form gets blurry. On the other hand, when the quill runs out of ink the stroke gets thinner looking like the light version of Klothilde. In order to emulate the different looks, I created six fonts with a common skeleton but different appearance which can be altered seamlessly by using the Variable Fonts technology (e.g. in latest Adobe apps or CorelDRAW Graphics Suite) along the Weight and Blurred sliders. But even without, Klothilde can be used even in longer copy. Use it from 18 pt upwards, flush left with tight leading and intersecting ascenders and descenders. Due to extensive manual kerning, it gives your text an even colour.

To my knowledge, Klothilde is one of the first script Variable fonts in different weights.

No, Klothilde’s letters are not connecting. But I added a whole bunch of connecting ligatures which are simply activated by the ligature feature of your app. Even Microsoft Word can do that. Thus Klothilde comes to life, as it should be expected from a handwriting font. In order to add to variety there are additional glyphs for some critical initial and standalone letters. Repeating letter combinations like nn, mm or rr are avoided by replacing the second letter by an alternative form. All features are activated by the standard ligature feature.

Ligatures are available for most European languages, some even in Cyrillic (some special Serbo-Croat letters included and accessible through localization or Style Set 08 features). Romanian comma-accent characters and ligatures are accessible through the OpenType locl feature.

For the topping on the cake, I added an alternate ampersand (stylistic set 1) and asterisk (ss04), an alternate Cyrillic b (ss02) and t (ss03), a few fleurons, arrows and a skull (OpenType feature ornm), fractions (frac feature), circled numbers (ss06) and an interrobang (ss07) which result in exactly 900 glyphs in each of the six fonts. There should be enough to play with. Should you be missing a special character, do give me a hint.