A few people have inquired about the font I chose for my personal logo. When I first chose the font, I selected it because it felt like me. Could I be any more ambiguous?

When I was searching for the perfect font for my logo, I wanted something inviting, somewhat feminine and dealt with the negative space between letters well — the k and y can cause problems in particular. I wanted a font with warmth — one that felt slightly personal. On the other hand, I did not want a script font. My personality is too structured for script.

I finally fell in love with Baker Signet. Its calligraphic influence combined with its roman structure spoke to me. Not surprising to see its handwritten quality when you note that it was designed by American calligrapher Arthur Baker. The serifs are small yet are the perfect finishing touch to the letterforms. The large openings on the a and e allude to my open nature and, when combined with the tight kerning, it helps represents my reserve to allow myself to be open to absolutely everyone. The sweeping descender on the y cradles the rest of karly and leads the eye back to the start of my name before moving on to my last name. The narrow set-width helps the overall shape of my name and keeps it from running too long.

As far as I can tell it only comes in one font weight even though I have read in several different locations that the bold version of the font was used in the Coke logo.

Not just bold but also oblique? I cannot find that version of the font anywhere, I guess I need to be Coke to be special enough to own it.

To help illustrate some of the concerns I ran into with my name in other fonts, let us take a look at it in the same fonts as my previous post.

Notice the similarities between the shape of Baker Signet and Adobe Garamond. They both have those large openings on the e and a, small set-width and low contrast between the thick and thin strokes. Although, Garamond is one of my favorite fonts, I felt it was not personalized enough for this purpose. Baskerville gives my name a much lighter feel, but my logo mark called for a slightly bolder font to help balance the weight of it. Bodoni starts to feel more masculine. I am not a fan of how my name looks in Century — those slab serifs make me think of a typewriter and lose the personal feel. As for Helvetica, it does not even begin to hit the mark of what I was trying to achieve. It feels very corporate and somewhat sterile.

This is not to say these were the only fonts I explored. In fact, I cannot even remember looking at these in particular when I did my original search.

What do you think of my choice? What font did you choose for your own personal logo? Why did you choose it?

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