Kessler Text is the natural companion to Kessler Display, reflecting the same structure, but with the technical nuance required of smaller scale, long-form texts.
Where its Display shines in the details of its hairlines and diamond shapes, Kessler Text distills this personality, ensuring the same twinkle without losing weight or causing reading discomfort. Kessler Text Regular is comfortable at 8pt with 12pt leading, while the Light weight will want slightly more scale to hold together. There is a ton of character in the small, sharp details maintained in the Text sizes, and distinctive curves found in glyphs like the lowercase a are maintained across all of Kessler’s styles. The italics carry the rhythms of Kessler quite literally forward, particularly with its standout, looping lowercase g. Other notable characters — such as the spurred lowercase r and the aristocratic capital A — sustain rich texture and even typographic color.
Traditionally, one could swap out the Text weight for the Display once the scale exceeds, say, 16pt. For more emphatic titling, or if you’re just too lazy for the nuance, Kessler Text Light can still serve just fine at larger sizes, and will create a more impactful horizontal rhythm due to the more significant top serifs. You’ll still get to enjoy Kessler’s diamond-shape titles and humble curves of its bowled letters.
Kessler Mono takes all of this systemic thinking and applies it to a monospace structure. Sure, one could say it’s a bit overdressed for coding, but who hasn’t met an engineer with a diva complex? The spacing is blissfully wide and doesn’t sacrifice detail by forcing characters to fill the width. Use the beautiful lining numerals, delicate brackets and backslashes to create an elegant texture.
Setting the point sizes with consideration to ample leading will help the white space maintain evenness — 9pt text with at least 13 pts of leading will achieve this, but be careful not to overdo it and lose the thread of the paragraph. Setting a handful of words in the mono will create a wholly unique essay title; a couple of lines of AI prompts might just encourage surprising results.
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Awards & distinctions
Type Directors Club New York 2020 Certificate of excellence
