Hello,
my name is Jens.

Jens Kutilek. That’s an unlikely combination of a Scandinavian first name and a Czech last name. But I’m German and live in Berlin. I speak German and English. A graphic designer by trade, my field of expertise is font technology and typeface design. I work as type engineer at LucasFonts.

Contact & Privacy policy

If you find any of my free fonts or scripts useful, you may consider buying me a coffee through the ‘Tip Me’ button at the bottom of the page.

Fonts

Some typefaces that I have designed are:

• FF Uberhand, 2008—2017, a typeface based on my handwriting
• FF Hertz, 2012—2015, a workhorse text typeface family
• Sudo, 2009—, a typeface for programming and command line use
• Comic Jens, 2007–2008, the precursor of FF Uberhand

Articles

• Reviving the IBM Selectric Composer Fonts – How I made a digitization of the Univers type style from the IBM Selectric Composer, but had to brush up my maths first. (2023)
• Normschrift – A variable font based on the ISO 3098 lettering standard. (2017)

Code

You can find some of my font-related scripts and programs on GitHub. Most of them can also be installed through the respective plugin managers in Glyphs and RoboFont.

• Curve Equalizer, a RoboFont extension and Glyphs filter plugin to adjust Bézier handles
• FontForgeImport, an importer for FontForge (SFD) files in Glyphs.
• Master Grid, per-master grids for Glyphs.
• Red Arrow, an outline quality checker for Glyphs
• RoboChrome, a RoboFont extension for editing color fonts
• Save to Git, save Glyphs file changes and commit them to git at the same time.
• Scrawl, TypeCooker-style drawing for Glyphs
• UnicodeInfo, a Unicode info palette for Glyphs and RoboFont
• vscode-fonttools, Font development support for Visual Studio Code

Meet me in person

If you’re in Berlin, you can regularly find me at the Typo† design conference and at the Typo­stamm­tisch. Apart from that, I also travel quite a lot to typography events like the ATypI conference, TypoDay† or Robothon. Well, at least you could before I had kids, and before the Corona pandemic happened.

Social networks

You can find me on Mastodon. I also have pro-forma accounts on Twitter and Facebook, but don’t bother.

Essays

PDFs of some essays I wrote at university, in German of course. Please mind the historical perspective in any tech-related topics.

• Dokumentation zu meiner Diplomarbeit (2005)
• Die Sex Pistols und die Situationistische Theorie (2004)
• Projekt: Überarbeitung einer Buchschrift (2003)
• Design in Japan – gestern und heute (2001)
• Design in Japan – Zeitleiste (2001)
• The Searchers/Der Schwarze Falke_ Symbolik vor dem mythologischen Hintergrund des Wilden Westens (2000)
• Außer Atem: Musik- und Geräuschdramaturgie in der Nouvelle Vague (1999)