Maurice Meilleur
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_Kast
Kast 4 and 3 specimens
 Kast is a multi-layered color font that I created for my 2015 MFA thesis. The design space is a virtual stack of cubes, 2 × 2 × 4 tall (the original version) or 3 tall (its successor).

Kast came out of a geometric display font project for my introductory typography students in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I created a demo design to show students how to constrain a design space and its rules to make a constructed script design more interesting and challenging. Developing that project and my own script design led me to start asking questions about how these scripts work generally, and why they’re so fascinating.
Kast 4 and 3 in joined fields
Kast 4 and 3 in joined fields
 In the Latin alphabet and its writing systems, conventional script designs focus on linear, horizontal relationships between and among the glyphs. Kast adds a second dimension, depth. And as I developed the design I saw it also implies a third, vertical and interlocking relationship between lines. Because managing vertical typographic relationships are beyond the capabilities of contemporary page layout and vector-graphic applications, Kast can only be properly typeset and styled with code, as I’m doing here with Python in DrawBot.

As the project went on I explored the design in papercraft and in an early incarnation of (then Google’s) Sketchup application.
Kast 4 in Google Sketchup
Kast 4 in Google Sketchup
Kast 4 in Google Sketchup
 An early version of the 4-cubes-tall Kast was a jury finalist in the Society of Typographic Aficionados’s 2016 protoType competition and exhibited at that year’s TypeCon in Seattle, WA. I completed the current true isometric versions of the design, shown in the specimens above, in 2019.