Notes · 13 October 2020
What the studio buys from Klim every year
The single foundry the studio licenses from most. A short note on why.
Klim Type Foundry gets more of the studio’s annual type budget than any other foundry, by a substantial margin. A short note on why.
The catalogue. Klim’s catalogue is unusually deep for a small foundry, in the senses that matter. The display faces are good. The text faces are good. The text faces have proper italic cuts. The display faces have multiple optical sizes. The mono faces are usable, which is rare. The variable releases are properly executed, with axes that do useful work.
The licensing. Klim’s licensing is the single most studio-friendly licensing in the field. Their desktop licence does what desktop licences should do. Their web licence is per-site, with sensible page-view tiers, and does not require a separate licence for staging environments. Their licensing terms are written in plain language. The contract is two pages, not twenty.
The price. Klim is not cheap. The studio’s spend on Klim faces is in the low thousands of pounds per year, depending on which projects are running. This is roughly the same as the studio spends on Adobe Fonts, with substantially more typographic value to show for it. For studios that ship a few sites a year, Klim is, per-project, often the cheapest serious type option once the typeface has paid for itself across multiple jobs.
The faces I keep coming back to.
Söhne for system-y interface work and quiet brand systems. Probably the most-used Klim face in the studio. The full family includes Schmal (narrow) and Breit (wide) cuts, which together cover almost any sans need a brand might have.
Tiempos Headline and Tiempos Text for editorial work. The cleanest news-editorial serif pairing the studio uses. Pairs with almost any sans, including Söhne.
Domaine Display for projects that want a more dramatic editorial weight. Less versatile than Tiempos Headline, more striking when the brief calls for it.
Calibre for projects that want a slightly warmer geometric sans than Söhne. Less common in the studio’s recent work, but used regularly for fashion and product brands.
National 2 for projects that want a humanist sans with more character than Inter. About once a year.
The Pangram Pangram catalogue, for what it is worth, is the closest competitor for the studio’s spend. Their catalogue is shallower than Klim’s, more trend-driven, and less reliably executed at body sizes. The price is lower. They are, for most projects, the second choice after Klim, not the first.
I would not recommend that every studio license most of its faces from a single foundry. The variety has its own value. But for studios looking for a single foundry whose catalogue is deep enough that almost every project can find a face that fits, Klim is the answer in 2020. The studio’s licensing budget reflects that.