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ABOUT

Typotheque [Peter Bilak]

Typotheque is an initiative of Peter Bilak and ui42 out of Bratislava (Slovakia), and later, The Netherlands: Typotheque is an Internet-based independent type foundry. It offers quality fonts for PC and Macintosh platforms in standard European character set and in CE (central european) character set. All fonts have full (european) character sets, are thoroughly tested and manually kerned.

Typotheque also offers its own type utilities: AccentKernMaker and FontAgent. In 2000, with Stuart Bailey, Peter Bilak co-founded art and design journal Dot Dot Dot. Along with Andrej Kratky he co-founded Fontstand.com, a font rental platform. Peter is teaching at the Type & Media postgraduate course at the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague.

Free fonts: Remix Typotheque and RaumSüd.

Commercial fonts: Fedra Sans (2001, 30 weights), Holy Cow (2000), Champollion (2000), Eureka (2000), Eureka Phonetik (2000), Eureka Arrows (2000), Eureka Glyphs (2000), Jigsaw (Light and Stencil, 2000, by Johanna Balusikova), Fedra Mono (2002), Fedra Bitmaps (2002), Fedra Serif (2003, 48 weights, with a characteristic shy female A, toes pointing inwards), Fedra Serif Display (2006) and Fedra Arabic (2006) .

Greta (2006-2007, Greta Text and Greta Display) is a newspaper type family designed initially for the main Slovak newspaper, SME. Greta Text won an award at TDC2 2007. It is also being used by the Sunday Times (along with Sunday Times Modern by Emtype and Flama by M. Feliciano). Greta Symbol (2012) is a 10-style 1200-glyphs-per-style superfamily of symbols commonly used in newspapers, magazines and online publications. Finally, Greta Mono (by Peter Bilak and Nikola Djurek) saw the light in 2015. Codesigner with Daniel Berkovitz of Greta Sans Hebrew (2015), which won an award at TDC 2016 and was released in 2017. Greta Sans supports Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Thai and Hangul. Greta Sans was designed by Peter Bilak, produced together with Nikola Djurek. Irina Smirnova designed the Cyrillic version. The Latin part has been published in 2012, the Cyrillic and Greek in 2015. In 2015, Greta Sans was recognised by the Tokyo TDC. The Arabic version was designed by Kristyan Sarkis and published in 2015. Greta Sans Devanagari was published in 2017, designed by Hitesh Malaviya at ITF under the supervision of Satya Rajpurohit. The Thai version was designed by Smich Smanloh from Cadson Demak, and published in 2019. This Hangul version was designed by Sandoll designers Yejin We and Jinhee Kim, and directed by Chorong Kim.

In 2005, Collins Fedra Sans and Serif were published for use in the Collins dictionaries. A slightly modified version of Fedra Sans is used by the Czech Railways.

In 2008, Peter Bilak, Eike Dingler, Ondrej Jób, and Ashfaq Niazi created the 21-style family History at Typotheque: Based on a skeleton of Roman inscriptional capitals, History includes 21 layers inspired by the evolution of typography. These 21 independent typefaces share widths and other metric information so that they can be recombined. Thus History has the potential to generate thousands of different unique styles. History 1, e.g., is a hairline sans; History 2 is Peignotian; History 14 is a multiline face; History 15 is a stapler face, and so forth.

In 2009, Bilak published the extensive Irma (Sans, Slab) family, which includes a hairline. Typotheque's other designer is Johanna Balusikova.

Collection of over 90 articles on type design by by Stuart Bailey, Michael Bierut, Peter Bilak, Andrew Blauvelt, Erik van Blokland, Max Bruinsma, David Casacuberta, Andy Crewdson, Paul Elliman, Peter Hall, Jessica Helfand, Steven Heller, Roxane Jubert, Emily King, Robin Kinross, Rosa Llop, Ellen Lupton, Martin Majoor, Rick Poynor, Michael Rock, Stefan Sagmeister, and Dmitri Siegel.

In 2011, he created Julien, a playful geometric display typeface loosely inspired by the early 20th century avant-garde. It is based on elementary shapes and includes multiple variants of each letter. It feels like a mix of Futura, Bauhaus, and geometric modular design.

Julien (2012) is a playful geometric display typeface loosely inspired by the early 20th century avant-garde.

Karloff (2012, Typotheque: Positive, Negative, Neutral) is a didone family explained this way: Karloff explores the idea how two extremes could be combined into a coherent whole. Karloff connects the high contrast Modern type of Bodoni and Didot with the monstrous Italians. The difference between the attractive and repulsive forms lies in a single design parameter, the contrast between the thick and the thin. Neutral, the offspring, looks like a slab face. They were made by Peter Bilak, Nikola Djurek and Peter van Rosmalen.

Lumin (2013) is a family that includes slab-serif, sans serif, condensed and display typefaces, and no attept is made to make them uniform in style.

Lava (2013) is a magazine typeface originally designed for Works That Work magazine. It was extended to a multilingual workhose typeface family. It as extended in 2021 to Lava 2.0, at which time they added a variable version of Lava that does this size-specific tracking optimization automatically---Typotheque calls it optical spacing. By 2021, Lava covered Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Telugu and Kannada. Typotheque collaborated with type designers Parimal Parmar, who drew the Devanagari; and Ramakrishna Saiteja, who drew Kannada and Telugu companions for Lava Latin, designed by Peter Bilak.

For Musée des Confluences in Lyon, France, Typotheuqe designed the custom sans typeface Confluence (2014).

For Buccellati Jewellery and Watches in Milan, Typotheque made the classy sans typeface Buccellati in 2013.

In 2016, Peter Bilak, Nikola Djurek and Hrvoje Zivcic published the Uni Grotesk typeface family at Typotheque. It is based on Grafotechna's 1951 typeface Universal Grotesk, which in turn is based on 1934 design by Vladimir Balthasar. Noteworthy also is the prismatic style Uni Grotesk Display.

In 2016, Peter Bilak designed the wayfinding sans typeface family November for Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew. Its rounded version is October. November, co-designed by Peter Bilak, Irina Smirnova and Kristyan Sarkis, won two awards at Granshan 2017. November Stencil was published in 2018.

The Q Project was conceived in 2016 by Peter Bilak, and published in June 2020. Nikola Djurek produced the Q Shape 01, loosely based on the Edward Catich's basic brush strokes from his book The Origin of the Serif: Brush Writing and Roman Letters. Bilak explains: The Q Project is a game-like [modular] type system that enables users to create a nearly infinite number of variations. Inspired by toys like Lego or Meccano, Q invites you to explore its vast creative space and discover not only new solutions, but also new problems. Q consists of ix uppercase Base fonts and 35 attachments that can be added as individual layers (Q Base and Serifs). It also comes with a variable font with a motion axis (Q Mechanic), as well as three levels of basic shapes that can be combined into new forms (Q Shapes).

In 2021-2022, Typotheque custom-designed the humanist sans typeface NRK Sans for the Norwegian broadcaster, NRK.

History won an award at ProtoType in 2016.

Behance link. Typedia link.

EXTERNAL LINKS
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INTERNAL LINKS
Commercial fonts (small outfits) ⦿ Sites with only a few free fonts ⦿ Font managers ⦿ Font software ⦿ Eastern European fonts ⦿ Dingbats (original) ⦿ Phonetic (IPAfonts) ⦿ Font managers (Mac) ⦿ Stencil fonts ⦿ Type design in Slovakia ⦿ Pixel/bitmap fonts ⦿ Monospaced fonts ⦿ Typography ⦿ Books on type design ⦿ Very thin (hairline sans) typefaces ⦿ Typefaces and type design for Arabic ⦿ Monospaced fonts ⦿ Typefaces with arrows ⦿ Icon fonts ⦿ Modern style [Bodoni, Didot, Walbaum, Thorowgood, Computer Modern, etc.] ⦿ Corporate typefaces ⦿ Prismatic typefaces ⦿ Cyrillic type design ⦿ Greek/Coptic ⦿ Hebrew font links ⦿ Tuscan fonts ⦿ Variable fonts ⦿