Interview with Olivia King: author of Penguin Inclusive Sans
- TypeCampus
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
by Debora Manetti, TypeCampus & Zetafonts
Olivia King is an independent Creative Director and Type Designer. Through her studio, she creates custom typefaces, brand identities and digital experiences for clients across culture, technology, and the arts. Her work focuses on accessible, expressive design systems that make contemporary design more inclusive and human. Recently she’s been working on custom typography projects for brands such as Penguin Books and SFMOMA, developing her own typefaces and teaching at the University of Technology Sydney.
This year, I had the honour and pleasure of serving as a member of the D&AD 2026 Type Design & Lettering jury, sharing the experience in person with an extraordinary group of fellow jurors during the jury sessions held at County Hall in London.
Over the course of the judging process, we reviewed 169 submitted projects spanning a wide spectrum of approaches to typography. Among them, only one project was awarded the category’s iconic Yellow Pencil: Penguin Inclusive Sans.
One of the reasons why I was particularly pleased to see the jury collectively converge on this decision is that Penguin Inclusive Sans represents something that extends beyond technical excellence alone. The project succeeds in bringing together rigorous accessibility research, functional clarity and a highly distinctive brand voice, while remaining emotionally resonant and immediately understandable even to audiences outside the design industry.
What makes the work especially compelling is its ability to demonstrate — in a very concrete and visible way — the cultural and strategic value typography can bring to a brand. Rather than treating accessibility as a purely technical constraint, the project transforms inclusive design into an integral part of Penguin’s editorial identity, proving that readability, warmth, personality and recognisability do not need to exist in opposition.
In many ways, Penguin Inclusive Sans feels like a project that brings people closer: to reading, to content, and to the idea that type design itself can shape emotional access and connection.
I’d love to ask you a few questions about that balance between function, expression and cultural impact.
Inclusive Sans began as a research-led accessibility project, but Penguin Inclusive Sans also had to function as a highly recognisable brand asset. At what point did you feel the typeface stopped being “neutral infrastructure” and started carrying a distinct editorial voice of its own?
Unlike Inclusive Sans, which was designed to be relatively brand-agnostic and adaptable across different contexts, Penguin Inclusive Sans always needed to carry a distinct personality. From the outset, the brief wasn’t simply to improve accessibility - it was to create a typeface that embodied three core brand traits: curiosity, play and boldness.
Because of that, it started developing its own voice very early in the process. Inclusive Sans provided a strong structural foundation, but the real challenge was shaping it into something that felt unmistakably Penguin. We spent a lot of time looking at the publisher’s history and visual archive, asking what elements felt familiar and recognisable while also considering how Penguin should express itself in the future.
The result wasn’t a neutral piece of infrastructure with a few brand details layered on top. It became a typeface whose accessibility features, historical references and personality all worked together to create a distinctive editorial voice.
"For me, that’s where the strength of a type system lies: not in choosing between function and character, but in allowing both to coexist."
Many contemporary global brands pursue simplification and visual neutrality in their typographic systems. Penguin Inclusive Sans seems to resist that tendency by introducing warmth and personality without compromising readability. Do you see expressive character and accessibility as naturally compatible, or did you have to consciously negotiate tensions between the two?
I see them as completely compatible. There’s often an assumption that accessibility requires a typeface to become more neutral or generic, but I’ve found the opposite to be true. Many accessibility-driven features can actually make a typeface more distinctive and recognisable.
That’s particularly important in brand typography. While there are certainly situations where a more utilitarian approach is appropriate - such as dense reading environments or product interfaces - I don’t think that means the brand voice should disappear. Typography can carry tone at every level of a system.
With Penguin Inclusive Sans, we approached this as a spectrum. The lighter and middle weights are optimised for readability in smaller and denser settings, while the display styles lean more heavily into personality and expression. Those characteristics shift depending on the context, but they’re all connected through the same underlying design language. For me, that’s where the strength of a type system lies: not in choosing between function and character, but in allowing both to coexist.
From a type design perspective, what were the most difficult formal compromises to solve when introducing accessibility-driven features into the letterforms without losing the overall texture, rhythm and recognisable “feel” of the typeface?
To be honest, I don’t think of accessibility as a compromise. I see it more as a creative constraint - one that often leads to more interesting design outcomes.
Rather than fighting against the overall texture or rhythm of the typeface, many of the accessibility considerations actually strengthened them. Features that improve character recognition often contribute to a more distinctive overall texture as well.
If there was one area that required constant attention, it was spacing. Spacing has an enormous influence on readability, but it’s also one of the key factors that shape rhythm and texture. Add too much space and the text begins to feel fragmented; remove too much and words become harder to recognise and process efficiently.
A lot of the work was about finding that balance. It’s not as visible as a particular letterform feature, but it plays a huge role in how welcoming and readable a typeface feels.
Penguin’s catalogue spans radically different literary tones — from canonical fiction to contemporary pop non-fiction. How did you approach designing a type system capable of supporting such a wide emotional and cultural range without becoming visually generic?
This was definitely one of the central challenges of the project. Penguin publishes an extraordinary range of content, and the typeface needed to feel at home across all of it.
For us, the answer wasn’t to make the typeface more neutral. Instead, it was to build flexibility into the system. We wanted a family with enough range that certain characteristics could be emphasised or dialled back depending on the context, while still maintaining a recognisable voice.
The archive played an important role here. Looking back through Penguin’s typographic history, we found that humanist influences brought a sense of familiarity, warmth and literary tradition, while grotesque influences introduced a more contemporary energy and personality. Bringing those two worlds together created a balance that felt distinctly Penguin-capable of supporting everything from classic literature to contemporary non-fiction without becoming bland or generic.
Inclusive design is often discussed in functional terms, but typography also shapes emotional access to reading. Were there specific moments in the design process where you realised a small formal decision could change not just legibility, but the feeling of being welcomed into a text?
Absolutely. One example we often talked about internally was what we called the “flicks and flourishes” throughout the typeface. These appear in characters such as the a, d, g, y and Q. On one level, they help create clearer distinctions between potentially confusing letterforms - particularly characters like d and b. But they also contribute something less measurable: a sense of warmth and friendliness.
Another example is the Penguin eye that appears in the tittle of the i. It doesn’t have a direct impact on legibility, but it introduces a subtle sense of play. It’s a tiny detail, yet it helps make the typeface feel more human and approachable.
Those moments reinforced an important lesson throughout the project.
Reading isn’t purely functional. Small formal decisions can influence whether a page feels cold or welcoming, intimidating or inviting. Accessibility isn’t only about helping people decode text - it’s also about making them feel comfortable enough to want to engage with it in the first place.
Once again, congratulations to Olivia King, and thank you for giving us a closer look at the inspiration and process behind this iconic project!
A project by Typecampus / Sponsored by Zetafonts
