Industry: Design

Typeface Family for Print and Web

Stone-carving practice translated into type design

Gordian is a sans serif typeface by Nikola Djurek, whose personal practice of stone carving informed the subtle flaring at stroke endings, rooted in Roman square capitals. The family spans four text weights with true italics and small caps, plus twelve display styles: Kapitalen (four weights of single capitals, including smart fonts with OpenType-driven rotating and baseline-shifting patterns) and Knot (eight sets of entangled double capitals with OpenType interactive patterns). Alternative glyphs via Stylistic Sets allow text to read as more classical or more contemporary. Released by Typotheque in 2018.

Set in Gordian

Insights

Designer Nikola Djurek practised stone carving; the resulting chisel-flared stroke endings distinguish Gordian from conventional sans serifs.
Gordian Kapitalen includes four smart fonts using OpenType substitutions that cycle or randomly rotate glyph alternatives and optionally shift glyphs above and below the baseline to create dynamic word patterns; Gordian Knot's eight sets of entangled double capitals use OpenType functions to generate interactive patterns of a different kind.
Nine numeral styles per weight—proportional old-style, lining, tabular lining, tabular old-style, small caps, superior, inferior, circled, and circled-inverted—allow purchasers to select a default variant at licence time.
Wider proportions on B, E, F, P, and S, plus a full lowercase, adapt the historically all-caps Roman inscription model for 21st-century text use.