Font of the Week #5: “Califunkia” by CounterPoint

   Good morning to everyone! I hope your week has been happy and productive. It’s time for Font of the Week #5. This week’s feature is Califunkia from my recently launched CounterPoint Type foundry.

Califunkia

   The design for Califunkia was inspired by a hand lettered sample in a book about old 1960s advertising and lettering for ads. I wanted to make use of numerous interlocking ligatures with this font in order to give it a more handdrawn feel. The technology of OpenType has been a real boon to font designers! Now we can use the almost unlimited number of glyphs available, as well as the automatic substitution features that OpenType provides to give the end user a font which is much more fluid and organic in its design.

   Gone are the days when we were limited to 256 characters per font and you had to actually create a seperate font for any swash or special characters that went with it. This makes OpenType fonts much easier for designers to use and gives the font developers almost unlimited creative opportunities with the typeface.

   With Califunkia I added over 260 specially designed ligatures to give the font a wide range of possibilities. Shown below is only a small sample…

This less “computery” hand lettered look is the future of OpenType, in my opinion and great use has been made of it so far. 

   The name Califunkia seemed to me to be the perfect fit. It incorporates the name of my home state as well as the word “funk”. The design of this font seemed to call up feelings of those 60s & 70s designs when funk music was so popular.

   Califunkia can be purchased directly from me, or at several online font vendors including Monotype (Fonts.com), MyFonts.com, FontHaus and Veer.