The letter ‘k’ is made up of a single ascending stem, and a diagonal arm and leg protruding to the right.
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| Components of a lowercase letter ‘k’ |
The left side of this letter is essentially identical to the lowercase
‘l’. Considerable variation exists in the right half of the letter, especially where the arm and leg meet, called the
join of the letter. Sometimes, particularly in older style typefaces, the join is an extension of the arm and the leg offshoots from it, other times, the arm and leg are disconnected from the stem and the two parts meet at an invisible point.
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| The ‘k’ in Georgia (left) has its leg extending out of its arm, which in turn emerges from its stem. In Warnock (right), the letter’s diagonals form a chevron discontinuous with its stem. |
The letter’s diagonals are very similar to the ones found on the
‘x’, so the ‘k’ can be constructed from an ‘l’ and the right side of an ‘x’. But since the letter only contains half of the ‘x’, the diagonals have to be extended horizontally to maintain width. This reduces the baseline–leg angle so much that the left side of its bilateral serif often gets absorbed into the leg itself. The right side of the serif often also melts into the leg to the point where only its bracket remains. In fact, many typefaces (like Warnock above) do away with those serifs completely.
Then you just need to design the join between the letter’s three strokes. Like the other compound letters we’ve made, the lengths of the serifs need to be adjusted slightly. As is good practice, the inner serif on the stem should be shortened slightly. But ironically, the top right serif at the tip of the arm actually needs to be
lengthened a bit. That’s because the top right part of the letter can appear very thin due to the hairline arm. So a bigger serif there helps even out the letter’s color density. The diagonals of the ‘k’ also have some visible radial flaring due to the extreme angle they make with the baseline or meanline.
