Hot Type’s Kit Sans feels at home in Kit’s brand refresh

When Hot Type was brought on to design a custom typeface for Koto’s rebrand of Kit – a marketing platform aimed towards the creator economy – the identity and branding were already in place. What it was missing was a contextual, custom typeface that would let the brand speak in an ownable, confident voice. Koto and Kit knew what they were looking for. “From the get-go, we knew it needed to be bold, condensed, with slightly rounded corners and preferably based on a Gothic skeleton. I love working with such precise parameters, and you’d be surprised at how much wiggle room is still open,” says Marko Hrastovec, Founder & Type Designer at Hot Type who took on the challenge of crafting the typeface, dubbed Kit Sans.

Kit’s logo provided a strong visual base for the development of the typeface. Its soft, bulging curves and expressive ink traps gave Hot Type a lot to work with, who crafted three visual routes before zooming in on one, and fine-tuning the details. The teams knew they wanted the typeface to be based on Franklin Gothic, and Hot Type ensured to meet this pointed detail of the brief. “There is an obvious stylistic/historical reference to Franklin Gothic, which was then taken through the ‘Kit’ filter, making it more warm and approachable, following an already established brand aesthetic,” Hrastovec tells us. “Later in the process it naturally became its own thing, with adjusted proportions, weight, spacing, and specific details in some letterforms.”

The process asked for a balancing act of how much of the logo’s characteristics could be imbued within the typeface; too little and it falls flat, too much and the typeface, which needs to work hard, looks awkward. “Type has its particular way of how much of an identity’s traits it can handle, so we had to find a balance between identity details and details that contrast it,” says Hrastovec. The new logo, as Hrastovec puts it, is “eccentric,” so the team needed to extract just enough of its flavour and stir it through the typeface. “The curved leg of the ‘K’ influenced the make of the ‘K,’ ‘R,’ and ‘k,’ while the pinched ‘t’ translated into pinched connections all over the typeface. The overall boldness and tight letter spacing stem from the logo as well,” he adds.

The result is a characterful font that can hold its own across Kit’s brand world without ever looking drab. It also benefited from a careful testing process, for which Hot Type used the variable format to find the right weight and the exact radius for the corners. “This way, the client was able to pull the sliders themselves and find the sweet spot,” says Hrastovec. “Kit Sans is a typeface that needs to perform more than it needs to catch attention,” so throughout the project, that tightrope walk to find the right mix of character and functionality was key.