Kaya Font

KAYA (turkish: rock) is a rugged typeface, with an edgy look and headstrong details, which I developed during my stay as an exchange student in Turkey. I did the first sketches while hitchhiking down the west coast and realized the typeface in the following term at the Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar University in the class of Sadik Karamustafa.

I tried to get inspired by the experiences I made and not by the things I saw – in order to create something, that reflects how I felt at that time. I felt like in Turkey, design is often about functionality. I doesn’t have to be appealing. It has to work out. This creates a tough look and a technical style. Other aspects were the rather emotional people with a down-to-earth mentality. All this were issues that influenced my type design.

As a result, KAYA turned out to be a typeface with humanistic and static aspects. A mix of feather stroke and slab serif. KAYA is able to speak lots of languages, contains ligatures and alternative glyphs, which can be activated through a stylistic set. At the moment, KAYA contains 208 glyphs and is due to its simple programming rather a headline font.

The font is available free of charge for non commercial projects – in exchange for font-in-use material.