Klavika by Eric Olson 

Have you ever wondered what is the name of the font used on Facebook's logo, well the "facebook font" is Klavika created by Eric Olson. Klavika is a flexible family of sans serifs for editorial and identity design.

Above: Comparison of Joe Kral of Cuban Council's customized Klavika with Process Type's own (by Gareth Hardy for Down with Design)

Since it was released in 2004, it's likely that you've seen Klavika every single day, possibly more than any other typeface out there. For one, a modified version by Cuban Council is in one of the most ubiquitous logos, and with it the most ubiquitous single letter marks, online. NBC had their entire cross-platform brand package in it for a few years. ESPN, Mozilla, Chevrolet, and nearly every piece of exhibition design I've seen dealing with the internet in some way have used and abused it as well.

It's hard to believe a typeface could become so widely seen so quickly—at least, until you look at it. For one, it's incredibly unique, with letterforms that hang somewhere between the full-featured personality of a grotesque, the utility of a humanist face, and the clean rigidity of a geometric. It's every bit the counterpart to Hoefler & Frere–Jones' Gotham, released four years earlier, but where Gotham trades in restraint and subtlety, Klavika's wonky counters offer a freshness and attitude of post-post-modernity, bringing the spirit of bitmap typefaces to print without the blocky translation to bezier curves they usually receive (this is part of the reason I'd like to never see the ghastly TrueType redrawing of Susan Kare's Chicago by Bigelow & Holmes from the late '90s in any of your projects).

On their site, Process Type describes the need Klavika filled:

Frustrated with a lack of fonts both versatile and modern, we set out to design Klavika as a full-featured, do-it-all sans serif for the needs of the 21st century. Our result is a design that’s unadorned, modern and infinitely flexible. To achieve this, Klavika follows a decidedly hybrid typographic path – a cross of humanist and geometric influences with allegiances to neither. Crisp and open shapes keep the font legible in small sizes while the straight-sided characters anchor headlines and display work solidly in place. And since part of the goal was flexibility, we’re happy to report that since its introduction in 2004, Klavika has found its way into a wide variety of media from print to pixels.

Part of the reason for the ubiquity is that sense of the industrial aesthetic also present in older health & safety signs: rather than doing a single thing well, its numerous weights and styles make it adaptable for nearly any use.

That said, while Klavika is hugely adaptable, it's also expensive (another trait it shares with Gotham). For $180, Klavika Basic is the lowest you can go and still get the total package (individual weights are priced at $40 a piece), but there are other options out there to get you a typeface with the same spirit.

In the header of this site (so as to make reference to a certain other use of Klavika), I used a typeface recently derived in this new hybrid typographic spirit. Its letterforms look similar enough to Klavika's in certain uses that it could be mistaken for it, but it isn't Klavika. Designed by Professor Luciano Perondi of Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino in the Campi Visivi Type Design course and shared on Google's Web Font project, Titillium OFL shares and in many ways shares the digital spirit in form of its Process Type predecessor. Being free and open source thanks to its Open Font License, though, it seems much more suited to the cyberpunk era than the restricted Klavika ever has.

What font I use currently for my blog... some even say it's not on their pc and asks how in the hell I do it lol... so anyways

Font: Klavika (aka similar to the Facebook version but theirs is Condensed)

How?: Cufon allows me to just enter code inside the blog's theme and poof, custom font.

Price of Klavika: $299.