Like the subject of the Kinks’ song, FS Lola is a little bit of both – a font with a rare combination of masculine and feminine.
The font was inspired by the song, which itself was inspired by the night the Kinks’ manager spent dancing drunkenly in a Soho club with a beautiful woman... Or so he’d thought, until her stubble started to show halfway through the evening.
Phil Garnham’s experience in designing FS Lola was similar to the one related by Ray Davies. Setting out to create a sans serif font, he realised along the way that he was actually dealing with a semi-serif.
He went with it, though, and produced a font with the best masculine and feminine qualities: hard edges and corners tempered by shapes of softness and generosity, the outcome of what Phil calls an “organic” design process.
“Initially, my designs were very graphic and hard but not very distinctive. By printing and redrawing the letters in pencil I achieved a softer and friendlier alphabet with a strong personality.”
Lola, as you’d expect, is very broad-minded. Available in five weights with italics – and fluent in central European languages – FS Lola offers a confident combination of feminine softness and male steeliness to any kind of design.
As the song says, “It’s a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world... except for Lola.”
