Miss Kooky began as an excuse to learn how to build an OpenType SVG font. I wanted to find out exactly what the format could do while keeping the artwork entirely vector-based—no painted bitmap images this time.
The technology was the experiment. The look came from greeting cards I’d been collecting on Pinterest.
Why birthday cards inspire me
One slightly unexpected source of inspiration for me is birthday cards. Actually, cards of any kind. I’m a little obsessed, mainly because my girlfriend has her own card ranges on Etsy, so I see rather a lot of them.
I liked the idea of giving Miss Kooky a layered, paper-cut appearance. It shares a little DNA with my Hitchcut font, but uses colour, overlapping shapes and far more detail.
Cards are essentially tiny design briefs. They have to communicate quickly, feel personal and stand out among dozens of competing designs. There’s room to experiment with lettering, illustration, colour, collage and texture.
They’re also very practical.
How did I create Miss Kooky?
I normally begin in Procreate, but Miss Kooky went straight into Illustrator. I set up guides for the baseline, x-height, cap height, ascenders and descenders, then started drawing.
As the design developed, a colour palette emerged: magenta, orange, light blue, green, red, blue and black. I tried to stick to it.
Where the shapes overlap, one colour multiplies into another and creates a new colour. It produced a lovely screen-printed effect without going anywhere near a screen-printing press.
I also added dots and odd little shapes inside the counters and gaps. They started as experiments but soon became an important part of the font’s character.
Fourteen versions of every letter
I drew far more characters than I originally intended. Rather than throwing the extras away, I gave every A–Z letter at least eight alternatives, most have fourteen different versions that can be accessed as stylistic alternates.
That gives you plenty of ways to vary repeated letters and build words that don’t look copied and pasted. I also added a whole collection of ligatures for letter combinations that worked better as a single design.
Take a closer look at the ligatures
Building the font with Fontself
There was still plenty of drawing, editing and changing my mind. Once the characters were finished in Illustrator, Fontself made it relatively quick to turn the artwork into a working font.
At the time, Fontself was fairly basic when it came to spacing and kerning. Importing the characters was the quick part. Making them sit together properly still took time—nudge something, test it, change it and repeat until it looked right.
Somehow, it all worked
Once the spacing and kerning were sorted, I could stop fussing over individual letters and look at the whole thing.
There was rather a lot going on.
Letters leaning at odd angles, overlapping colours, dots and little shapes tucked into every available gap.
But the colours and patterns worked together.
Miss Kooky looked like someone who turns up to your birthday wearing three things you’d never put together, then makes you wonder why you hadn’t.
It’s uppercase only, with plenty of alternative letters and ligatures, so you can play around with the arrangement yourself.
Miss Kooky font FAQs
Does Miss Kooky include uppercase, lowercase, numbers and punctuation?
Miss Kooky includes uppercase A–Z, numbers, punctuation and symbols. There are no lowercase characters.
Does Miss Kooky include alternates?
Yes. It includes numerous alternative glyphs for each letter from A to Z. You can access them through the Glyphs panel in Photoshop or Illustrator.
Does Miss Kooky contain ligatures?
Yes. It includes a large selection of ligatures.
Does Miss Kooky have OpenType features?
Yes. It includes stylistic alternates and ligatures, with full-colour SVG vector artwork built into the characters. Use software with suitable OpenType support to access these features.
What weights or styles are available?
Miss Kooky comes in one OpenType SVG colour style. There isn’t a family of different weights.
What languages does Miss Kooky support?
Basic Latin. Contact me before buying if your project needs accented characters or support for a particular language.
Which font formats are supplied?
Miss Kooky is supplied as an OTF for desktop installation on Mac and Windows. No image backups are included.
Does Miss Kooky have any limitations?
The colour artwork needs software that supports OpenType SVG fonts. The product page lists Illustrator CC 2018+, Photoshop CC 2017+ and InDesign CC 2019+. Older applications and some systems or font managers may display the font in black or render it incorrectly.
Check your software’s support before buying. The download contains one colour font style and no image backups.
What licence comes with Miss Kooky?
The standard purchase includes a one-user Desktop licence. Choose more users on the Miss Kooky product page if needed. App, electronic document and digital advertising or email licences are available as add-ons.
For company-wide use, servers, games or broadcast, contact me for a tailored licence. See the font licence agreement for the full terms.
Written by Simon Stratford, type designer and graphic designer. These are my opinions, reached after too little sleep and too much coffee. You can also follow my antics on @itsmesimonok, or leave a comment below. Despite all the opinions, I’m actually quite nice.