Lava

Lava was originally designed for comfortable long-form reading at 8 to 12 points, to bridge the digital and print editions of Works That Work magazine. The intention was to create a voice of a publication: confident enough not to need to show off, with the comfortable, relaxed manner of an engaged storyteller, ready to handle long stories, but also shine in larger titles. A single typeface for the entire publication. It’s extremely legible and harmonious at small sizes, sophisticated and elegant at large sizes.

Although Lava is a strictly contemporary typeface designed for digital environments, which avoids historicising, it has learned its lessons from the past to increase legibility — large counters and apertures, unambiguous letter shapes, generous vertical proportions, consistent spacing and kerning, designed for screen first, and performing well even in low resolution. In print, Lava delivers something that default UI fonts usually lack: refined details, clarity, finely tuned proportions and meticulous spacing, which let the reader forget about the typeface and pay attention to the text.

Lava is part of Typotheque’s Global Font collection supporting hundreds of languages and various writing scripts. In the long term, Lava intends to support all living languages with a community of active speakers. Currently, Lava supports the following writing scripts: Arabic, Armenian, Bangla, Canadian Syllabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Georgian, Greek, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hebrew, IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), Kannada, Korean, Latin, Malayalam, Odia, Ol Chiki, Tamil, Telugu, and Thai. We are working on extending the language to other writing scripts, including Chinese. This makes Lava an unprecedented design project.

Dealing with various unrelated writing scripts, while aiming for cultural authenticity and maintaining the design principles of the typeface is extremely challenging. Each writing tradition requires a rethinking of the horizontal and vertical proportions of the typeface, and stroke weight distribution. Additionally, each writing script has a different text density, so the basic stroke weight needs to be modified in order to achieve a balanced overall text image. We need to research the cultural traditions and conventions, and influences of technology, to render diverse languages correctly, with respect, and at the highest aesthetic and technological levels.

Lava is also available in a variable font format with automatic size-specific tracking, where the shapes of letters do not change, but their spacing and kerning are size specific, triggered by the user’s size selection. Essentially, we spaced and kerned every font in the family three times, for a small size of about 6 points, a default size of 10 points, and a large size of 48 points, at the intended viewing distance of 40 cm. The increased horizontal spacing is beneficial for reading acuity and significantly improves reading performance. Read an essay about the background to the year-long research we carried out into optical spacing.

Each weight of Lava includes nine different kinds of numerals. Default numerals are proportional old-style (ranging) numerals, for use in running text. Lava also includes lining figures for use with capitals letters, because their proportions match the height of caps. Small caps figures for use in all small caps setting, tabular (both lining and old-style figures), superior and inferior figures, and finally circled and circled inverted figures. When you take a licence for this font, you can choose the default numeral variants inside the fonts.

Lava also supports the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), featuring a comprehensive repertoire of glyphs for the transcription of linguistic data. The font also covers First Nations roman orthographies of Indigenous languages spoken in Canada (Wakashan, Algonquian, Salishan, Tsimshianic, Iroquoian and Eskaleut languages), and, additionally, it covers African Indigenous roman orthographies for languages such as Hausa, Ɗuwai, Igbo, Akan, Kabiye, Ewe, etc. The IPA support is embedded inside the Latin fonts and every other language version, so you don’t need to take a separate licence for it.