Typeface Design for a Wood-Type Letterpress Family
Wood type revival with built-in letterpress imperfection
Woodkit Reprint is one of three subfamilies within the Woodkit type system, designed by Ondrej Jób and published by Typotheque in 2014. Its letterforms draw from large-scale wood type letterpress tradition and incorporate deliberate print imperfections. The broader Woodkit system covers Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts across six styles, and includes an Ornaments set of 500 symbols and a Figures style enabling combinatorial block figures. The family received a TDC Typographic Excellence award in 2015.
Set in Woodkit Reprint
Insights
- Basic ligatures rotate among three glyph variants per character; contextual alternates expand this to five variants (three full-square-width, two half-square-width); discretionary ligatures restrict rotation to the two half-square variants only.
- The Woodkit Figures style stacks modular blocks—78 heads, 8 arms, 8 legs, 8 trunks, 10 hats—yielding nearly 400,000 combinatorial figure possibilities.
- The Woodkit Ornaments set contains 500 symbols including mid-century-inspired dingbats and seamless patterns designed to complement the other Woodkit styles.
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