In his diaries Franz Kafka’s contemporaries live on in detailed characterizations, often spiced with irony: “… two friends, one of them blond, resembling Richard Strauss, smiling, reserved, clever; the other dark, correctly dressed, well mannered yet firm, too dainty, lisped; both of them gourmets, kept drinking wine, coffee, beer, brandy, smoked incessantly, one poured for the other …”
These two young men – Franz Kafka met them in summer 1914 – and Kafka’s unique handwritten diary entries were inspiration and source for the typeface pair FF Mister K Splendid & FF Mister K Splendid Light.
Positive traits combined with little faults and exaggerations – that’s what makes the two friends in Kafka’s diary, and also the Splendid typeface duo so sympathetic: a splendid “semiperfect” pair.
One more Kafka quote – about an actress he admired, but you could think he is talking about the Splendids.“Her mouth opens as though in childish complaint, running above and below into delicately formed curves, one imagines that the beautiful shaping of words which spreads throughout them and preserves their pure contours with the tip of the tongue, can succeed only once, and admires how everlasting it is.”
Mister K type family members received a Certificate of Typographic Excellence at the Moscow Modern Cyrillic Competition, an ISTD Premier Award in London and a TDC Award at the New York Type Directors Club Typeface Design Competition.