Jack Bennett
About Me
Work
Air Louis
Perkele Font Family
The Path to Discovery
Impact Atlas
Herzog Sequence
DIVE
How To Make Taffy
Labor Collages
The Laws of Simplicity
Perkele Font Family
Perkele is a display font family developed first by hand and digitized using Glyphs. It’s inspired by the culture of Finland, the country my family emigrated from 120 years ago, and embodies the influences of industrial design and ancient folkways.
Research & Development
Combing through the cultural history of Finland, the things that came to influence my font’s development most were the above: an ancient Birch Bark letter found in Karelia, craft embellishments of midcentury industrial designers such as Saara Hopea, and ubiquitous everyday objects such as Fiskars scissors and Nokia phones.I wanted my type to reflect these things in the hand that might’ve put stylus to birch bark, steadily carving out legible yet gently playful forms.
Using various media, the initial ideas of form for the first type specimens were prepared and digitized.
As the type developed, form and structure within the letters were made uniform and strings of text were examined for even type color and flow. Once that was settled, it was time to develop the full font family.