Keyserling (pronounced kai-ser-ling), is a family of fonts heavily influenced by Walbaum and Baskerville. It features a text weight, an italic weight, and a special weight, called Fugue.
Keyserling Fugue is inspired by the work of 17th Century writing master George Bickham the Elder. What if the beautiful, intricate decorative writing of Bickham could be tamed into a font?
To realize this, I developed a grid system for flourishes so that even though they would see and feel very freeform and expressive, the letters would “lock” into one another as if they were connected.
The name Keyserling comes from the story behind Johann Sebastian Bach’s famed Goldberg Variations:
Once upon a time, Count Hermann Carl von Keyserling, Russian Ambassador to the Saxon Electoral Court in 1742, was quite an insomniac. He asked his good friend, Bach, to compose him a set of pieces to listen to during his sleepless nights, and that became the Goldberg Variations.
I believe the contrapuntal harmony present of Bach’s work is very much like type design. You begin with two or three beautiful motifs that are repeated, reused, and varied throughout the work. Both counterpoint and typography require an un- derstanding of systems. Both are beautiful.
Keyserling Fugue is a responsive, voice activated typeface that responds to interaction. When the reader begins to read aloud, Keyserling will deploy its Fugue state and animate and grow its curves with the reading.
