Kevin King
Kevin King is a typeface designer, typographer, calligrapher, and type researcher based in Canada. After working at Toronto’s Coach House Press and Canada Type, he completed his Master’s degree in Typeface Design with distinction at the University of Reading in 2018.
His work focuses on font support and research for minority languages, working directly with Indigenous communities in North America to support their language revitalization and preservation efforts. Through his work collaborating with Typotheque, he has contributed to reforming the text standardisation for the Unified Canadian Syllabics in the Unicode Standard through character additions and representative glyph revisions.
In conjunction with his type design work, he maintains a calligraphy practice, teaching workshops and lecturing on both subjects in Canada and Europe.
The Indigenous languages in North America feature not only a richness in linguistic diversity, but also a wealth of orthographic diversity, unique writing scripts, and distinct typographies not found anywhere else in the world.
Despite such a high number of living languages and such graphic richness, Indigenous communities continue to face widespread challenges not only towards typographic expression, however, to even accessing and using their languages on essential digital platforms. Further, if fonts do support the rendering requirements for a given language, they are often only a handful and in limited styles.
In order to understand both technical barriers and typographic preferences for individual Indigenous communities, Typotheque engages in community-based partnerships to conduct research work to overcome technical roadblocks and in identifying typographic preferences together with local readers, explore new typographic expressions in the language.
In this lecture, Typotheque’s Kevin King will present about the community-partnered work that the Typotheque North American Type Research team engages in with Indigenous communities research and design process through examining case studies of collaborative initiatives with First Nations communities in British Columbia. These efforts reveal how technical barriers were overcome and access to wider typographic palettes were explored and achieved.
