The student project that ended up on the cover of VOGUE
The typeface that began as an unrealistic project for an intern. Nine years later, it has appeared on the cover of Vogue and across some of the world's best-known brands. Here is how that happened, and what just got better.
Silk Serif is the typeface that started everything for me. It was the first one I ever released, and still the one most people know me for, and somehow I never sat down to tell its story. There's a new update out now, so this feels like the right moment. But before I get to what's new, let me take you back to when I had no idea what I was doing.
A magazine, a course, and a deadline
It all started at Glamour Iceland, a Condé Nast publication, where I was interning with the creative director, Regina Rourke. We needed a typeface for the magazine. Regina wanted something light, high-contrast and elegant for the headlines. We looked everywhere. Nothing was quite right.
Meanwhile I had just started a type design course at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and thought, how hard can it be? I soon realised that it was an enormous task for a second-year student with no experience in type design, so this was, objectively, a terrible idea. But it turns out drawing letters just clicked for me. We ended up using it in the magazine, and a year and a half later my little "how hard can it be" project had somehow become a fourteen-style family and my graduation project.
An art student with no idea what she was starting
The very first sketches
Named after a nail polish
For a long time the working name was The Intern. But I needed something better for my final project. So my friends and I did the only responsible thing and went through every nail polish in the Glamour office until one felt right. My friend held up a little silver bottle called Silk. That was it. I've named every typeface since after textiles: Silk, Velour, Chiffon, and so on.
Silk Serif on the pages of Glamour Iceland
The printed specimen from my graduation project
Seeing it out in the world
I put Silk Serif up for sale after graduating, mostly just to finish the project properly. I didn't really expect anyone to buy it, so I was amazed when it became one of the best-selling fonts on MyFonts.
Since then I've seen it in places I never imagined. Condé Nast, Nike, Penguin Random House, DuJour, Bobby Berk. It was on the cover of Vogue Netherlands. Once, walking around New York, I looked up and saw it on a giant billboard for a cosmetics store and nearly walked into traffic. On the same trip I marched into Bergdorf Goodman because I knew they had licensed it, found it inside a magazine they had published, and got so excited I told the cashier I designed the font. He had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. I was thrilled anyway.
It still feels surreal that letters I drew at a tiny desk in art school ended up in all these places.
Silk Serif, out in Manhattan
Found it in a Bergdorf Goodman magazine
Very proud designer after a chat with a cashier
It keeps getting better
Here is the thing about a typeface: it is never really done. And let's be honest, I was a student when I made this one. There were things that could be better. So in early 2025 I gave Silk Serif a big update. I improved the kerning, added symbols, and made a lot of small adjustments to the shapes. Nothing that changed its character. It was still Silk Serif, just more refined.
What's new now
And that brings me to today. Silk Serif has two new things.
First, it's now a variable font. For years, the family came as fourteen static weights. Now every weight, from the most delicate Extra Light to a solid Black, lives on a single axis. You can stop wherever you like, including weights that never existed as fixed styles before. Technically it's two variable files, one for the roman and one for the italics. It's lighter to work with, and it finally behaves the way I always wanted it to in responsive layouts and in motion.
Second, Silk Serif now supports Vietnamese. If you read my Dupioni post, you know I fell down this rabbit hole: two trips to Vietnam and an obsession with accents, hooks, dots and horns. I promised then that I'd bring Vietnamese to my older families too, and Silk Serif was always going first. I didn't want the marks to feel added on at the end. I wanted them to feel like they had always been there.
So that's Silk Serif, nine years in, still the same typeface, and still growing. If you own the full family, the whole update is free, so check your inbox for the download link. If you own some of the static styles, the Vietnamese update is free. And if you don't own it yet, you can now buy the full family, or the roman or italic collection on its own, seven styles plus the variable font. The static styles are, of course, still available too.
