TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Mon Oct 28 17:12:12 EDT 2024

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ABOUT

David Brezina

Czech designer (b. Brno) who graduated with a Masters in Informatics at the Masaryk University in Brno in 2005, spent a term at the Denmark's Designskole in Copenhagen in 2004 and graduated with distinction from the MA in Typeface Design at the University of Reading in 2007, where he wrote a thesis on his typefaces called Skolar and Surat. Skolar won an award at Paratype K2009. It was designed with scholarly and multilingual publications in mind. See, e.g., Skolar Devanagari. Later David founded Rosetta Type.

From 2004 to 2007, he ran his own design studio DAVI, with projects in graphic, web and interface design. Back in Brno, he worked with Tiro Typeworks (Canada) as an associate designer. At ATypI 2008 in St. Petersburg, he spoke about multi-script typography.

His typefaces include

• CODAN (2005): a typeface inspired by the city of Copenhagen.
• Yunnan (2004): oriental simulation face. Discussion on typophile.
• Skolar and Surat (2008). Skolar was designed for multilingual scientific publications and is a serifed typeface in the Menhart tradition. It was published in 2009 by Type Together, and it is also listed by Rosetta Type. Skolar Basic (2009, Type Together) is the official name of this 6-style text family. Surat is an accompanying Gujarati family. Related to that, he wrote The evolution of the Gujarati typographic script (2007, University of Reading). Rosetta writes: Skolar was originally designed for academic publications: its vast character set caters for 90+ Latin-script languages, and its Greek and Cyrillic extensions together with Latin transliterations add support for another 70+ languages. All scripts are available with small caps, superior and inferior letters, five sets of numerals and alternate character forms (see note about the versions below). A comprehensive set of arrows (easily accessed via OpenType) and bullets round off the character set to meet the needs of even the most complex editorial and academic text settings. The light and extrabold styles (upright and italics) were designed with help from Anna Giedrys and Elena Schneider. Skolar's Cyrillic harmonises well with the Latin in its careful balance of distinctive styling and solid performance. Designed in consultation with Alexandra Korolkova, it supports most Slavic languages as well as many others like Kazakh and Mongolian. Additionally, Skolar includes language-specific forms for Serbian and Bulgarian. The Greek is a modern interpretation of the classic styles found in academic works, and is characterised by lively, fluid forms and varying stress. It includes both monotonic and polytonic Greek, and was designed in consultation with Irene Vlachou and Gerry Leonidas. Complete Skolar family also supports Indic scripts Devanagari (codesigned with Vaibhav Singh) and Gujarati distributed separately. Skolar has received international praise at the 2008 ED Awards, and was also shortlisted as one of the best typefaces that year by I LOVE TYPOGRAPHY. In 2009, the Cyrillic was awarded a Special Diploma at the international type design competition Modern Cyrillic, and won the first prize in Granshan's Cyrillic text type category. In 2015, the 72-font family Skolar Sans (see also, Skolar Sans PE, 2016), codeveloped by David Brezina and Slava Jevcinova at Rosetta Type Foundry, won a silver medal at the European Design awards. Skolar PE was added in 2020.
• Yrsa and Rasa (2015, open-source type families published by Rosetta with financial support from Google). The fonts support over 92 languages in Latin script and 2 languages in Gujarati script (Gujarati and Kachchi). The design and production are by Anna Giedrys and David Brezina. Yrsa is the name of the Latin-only type family. Rasa is the name of the Gujarati type family. They explain: Both type families are intended for continuous reading on the web (longer articles in online news, magazines, blogs). In Yrsa, a special consideration was given to Central and East European languages and proper shaping of their accents. Rasa supports a wide array of basic and compound syllables used in Gujarati. In terms of glyphs included Rasa is a superset of Yrsa, it includes the complete Latin. What makes Yrsa & Rasa project different is the design approach. It is a deliberate experiment in remixing existing typefaces to produce a new one. The Latin part is based on Merriweather by Eben Sorkin. The Gujarati is based on David Brezina's Skolar Gujarati.
• Adobe Gujarati (2012).
• In 2019, at Rosetta Type, together with Slava Jevcinova and William Montrose, he released the variable font Adapter (with three axes, for latin, Greek and Cyrillic).
• In 2020, he released Handjet (started in 2018, at Rosetta Type), which is built on the principle of a dot matrix printer or handjet printer. Glyphs are made up of collections of individual modules that take 23 elemental shapes. The Handjet family covers Armenian, Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin. Github download link.
• Gridlite (2020, Rosetta Type) is a modular pixel typeface with adjustable foreground and background patterning. It also has a variable type format with three axes, Weight, Background, and Element Shape.

Blog. Myfonts link. Klingspor link. Speaker at ATypI 2013 in Amsterdam on the topic of multilingual type design.

EXTERNAL LINKS
David Brezina
 [Designer info]
Klingspor Museum page
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS
Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type design in Czechia ⦿ Oriental simulation fonts ⦿ Gujarati fonts ⦿ Type blogs ⦿ The Canadian type scene ⦿ Indic language fonts ⦿ Type design in India ⦿ Greek/Coptic ⦿ Cyrillic type design ⦿ Sites with only a few free fonts ⦿ Pixel/bitmap fonts ⦿ Typefaces and type design for Arabic ⦿ Hebrew font links ⦿ Armenian fonts ⦿ Variable fonts ⦿