The origins of Wulkan date back to a decade ago when designer Jan Estrada-Osmycki was searching for an expressive serif typeface for use in a personal project. Unable to satisfy his specific needs, Jan decided to create his own, taking inspiration from the likes of Caslon Graphique, ITC Grouch and the lettering work of Tom Carnase and Herb Lubalin to name a few.
The result was a highly expressive display typeface with a strong personality built upon spiky serif details, ball terminals and calligraphic like flow.
The reception of Wulkan since the first public release in 2019 exceeded our expectations. We have seen many beautiful uses of Wulkan over the years; thank you to anyone who has licensed it. As time has passed, we desired to expand Wulkan. At first, we only thought to add a supporting Text family to the existing Display family. But as we got deeper into the project, one thing lead to another and before we knew it Jan was redrawing the whole typeface from essentially the ground up. It was a significant challenge, one we wish to not repeat.
We learnt going back to an old project can be equally as painful as it is rewarding. The end result in addition to redesigning the Display family includes the new Text and Headline families, variable font support, a new Black weight, optimisation of the design for longer texts and new OpenType features like small caps and swashes.
The legacy version of Wulkan Display can be found here.