by Emily Floyd and Dan Milne
Kesh Regular was created by artist Emily Floyd in collaboration with Dan Milne from TypeLab. Works on paper printed by Michael Kempson at Cicada Press, University of New South Wales.
Kesh Regular is a specially designed typeface for Ursula K. Leguin’s invented Kesh language. The Kesh are a matriarchal, ecosophical society described by Le Guin in her novel Always Coming Home — an ‘archaeology of the future’ that contains stories, poems, and anthropological commentary. The Kesh language is a model of a worldview where ‘to be rich is the same word as to give, as there is no grammatical provision for a relation of ownership between living beings’. To speak in Kesh is to affirm the possibility of a different world.
Kesh Regular was produced for the occasion of the exhibition A Working Model of the World, curated by Lizzie Muller and Holly Williams, presented at UNSW Galleries and the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons School of Design/the New School, New York in 2017. The font is an open source resource.
The glyph set of Kesh Regular is based upon hand drawn glyphs in the appendix of Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home. It comprises a lowercase alphabet, assorted ligatures and punctuation.
Kesh Regular works best in OpenType-savvy applications with the OpenType Ligature feature switched on to allow automatic substitutions. Kesh words spelled phonetically in the Latin script are converted automatically into the Kesh script.
UPPERCASE TO LOWERCASE
The Kesh script is lowercase only however the font has been made so that input text can be upper- or lowercase or a combination. When the Ligature feature is switched on, uppercase letters are automatically converted to lowercase.
LIGATURES AND DOUBLE-LETTERS
The Kesh script includes a number of sounds such as 'ai', 'sh', 'hw' and 'ch' which are represented as combined letters in the latin script. In addition, the Kesh script represents double-letters by adding a double-letter accent (a small arc shape above). These sounds and double-letters are handled as ligatures in the Kesh Regular font, automatically substituted when the Ligature feature is on.
ACUTE ACCENTS
The Kesh alphabet includes three sounds which are represented using acute accents in the latin script ( í ó ú ). These must be inserted manually by typing or via a layout interface such as the Glyph palette in InDesign.