About KAYA (turkish: rock) is a rugged typeface, with an edgy look and headstrong details, which I developed during my stay as an exchange student in Turkey. I did the first sketches while hitchhiking down the west coast and realized the typeface in the following term at the Mimar Sinan G zel Sanatlar University in the class of Sadik Karamustafa.
I tried to get inspired by the experiences I made and not by the things I saw ? in order to create something, that reflects how I felt at that time. I felt like in Turkey, design is often about functionality. I doesn?t have to be appealing. It has to work out. This creates a tough look and a technical style. Other aspects were the rather emotional people with a down-to-earth mentality. All this were issues that influenced my type design.
As a result, KAYA turned out to be a typeface with humanistic and static aspects. A mix of feather stroke and slab serif. KAYA is able to speak lots of languages, contains ligatures and alternative glyphs, which can be activated through a stylistic set. At the moment, KAYA contains 208 glyphs and is due to its simple programming rather a headline font.
The font is available free of charge for non commercial projects ? in exchange for font-in-use material.
