Beauty and Ugliness in Type Design

Hello everyone! 

A little about the site---Typotheque is a type foundry run by two designers who explore the development of type and have their own collection of  fonts which can be purchased. The article section has interviews, reviews, essays more geared towards the ideas revolving around the creation of new typefaces. While looking through numerous articles I was disappointed with the lack of visual examples, but I still found an interesting entry about a typeface whose principal design feature does not take into consideration  legibility or aesthetics, but rather focuses more on a conceptual aspect. 

Full article-- Beauty and Ugliness in Type design

Typeface: Karloff 
Classification: Serif
Released: 2012
Conceived by Peter Bil'ak, designed by Pieter van Rosmalen with assistance of Nikola Djurek

 This typeface is the result of a project, in which the high contrast of the Modern type of Bodoni and Didot was combined with the Italians from the middle of the Industrial Revolution. 

Example of Bodoni: While any choice representing beauty is bound to be very personal and subjective, many agree that the high-contrast typefaces created by Giambattista Bodoni and the Didot clan are some of the most beautiful in existence.

Example of Italian: This reversed-contrast typeface was designed to deliberately attract readers’ attention by defying their expectations.

I'm a big fan of Bodoni and Didot and used them a lot in Typography 1, so the article captured my attention quickly. Since the release of this typeface was fairly recent, they are in the process of promoting it, so there aren't many examples of it in use in products. The fusion of these extreme fonts is really unique and was executed in a way that effectively conveyed the relation between our perception of beauty and ugly letter forms. I like Karloff because it has personality. To me, the typeface is both memorizing and confusing to look at because my eye disagrees with the thick and thin lines in one letter, but enjoys them in another. The shapes created in both positive and negative space are also interesting. I would like to save this typeface to use in maybe a poster design or flyer with a bold statement of some sort. 

Thanks for reading, 

Marissa