The world of Czech type design
Czech type designers have become significant players in the field of global typography – the design of glyphs and letterforms, better known as fonts. As Dominik Jůn discovered, this field of artistic graphic design is also strongly linked to Czech history and national identity.
As with any field of human endeavour, Czech type design has its own list of key people that have built up this unique profession – names such as Vojtěch Preissig, Oldřich Menhart, Ladislav Sutnar and František Štorm.
In 2024, a major seven-part Czech Television series called “Identita” sought to popularise the history of Czech graphic design. The series included a special emphasis on type designers, those people whose job it is to design new and exciting forms of lettering, be it for brands, signs, newspapers or books.
Here is a clip from Identita of American type designer Richard Kegler discussing Czech type design:
“My relationship to Czech typography is…I sort of stumbled upon it. And the more I dug into it, the more I was fascinated with it, and I decided I needed to find out more.”
Identita also yielded a book as well as an English-language feature film, titled Identity: A Czech Graphic Design Love Story. The film was hosted by another American, graphic design historian, Nicholas Lowry:
“In fact, the true bastion of [Czech] typography is Brno…The Republic’s second-largest city is so famous for its typography that it gets orders for fonts from all over the world. And not only from countries that use Latin letters. Fonts are designed for Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and many other alphabets…”
Petra Dočekalová is Prague-based Czech type designer, typographer, letterer, letter artist, and calligrapher – and yes, all of these are separate fields – and she featured in the Identita TV series:
“I’m super happy that the series Identita happened and that Filip Blažek and Linda Kudrnovská and Michal Gregorini made this. Because it helped to spread knowledge of typography and graphic design to the average public, and to open up the discussion about what we have by way of cultural heritage here. Including high-quality typefaces and visual brands and logotypes created by people who are almost celebrities but typically hidden from the normal public spotlight.”
Filip Blažek, one of the key figures behind Identita, is an award-winning graphic designer at the studio Designiq. I asked him to explain why a small country like the Czech Republic has such a large footprint in this field:
“I think the Czechoslovak history of type design is pretty amazing. It all started before Czechoslovakia was born in the early 20th century. There was a huge demand for local Czech typefaces, and this demand was expressed by journalists, artists and printers. And several artists responded to this call and they submitted their proposals."
“Some of the typefaces were actually quite successful. The work by Vojtěch Preissig – his typefaces were beautiful and continue to inspire typographers until today. And Oldřich Menhart, an amazing calligrapher, also designed several typefaces. He was the first Czech type designer who managed to sell his work through international foundries.”
Type foundries are where typefaces are made. Formerly using metal blocks, today on computer. Noted typographer Martin Pecina, whose key field is book design, explains:
“In the past you would use ink and pens and cardboard and so on. Nowadays the process is completely different. A lot of designers still use paper for sketches, but most work is now done via the computer."
“I think František Štorm, for example, does it this way. So the process is different and is much, much faster than it was. Back then, for example, when you had those competitions for typefaces, it took years to develop and create the finished product.”
František Štorm is a renowned typographer, whose Storm Type Foundry saw success in the post-1989 graphic design boom. Petra Dočekalová again:
“What the public doesn’t know is that behind every typeface – the simple alphabet – is a human hand. It is not generated by computer. Someone really draws each glyph by hand, maximised and zoomed in, and then transfers this into a font."
“And what previously was done by 300 people as part of the process of typecasting and metal-punching and type founding is today done by one person with the right software and a computer, which speeds up the process hugely.”
But back to the history of Czech type design. Martin Pecina again:
“When you look at the Latin alphabet, it wasn’t meant for Slavic languages at first. So we encountered some problems with specific sounds that were not included in the Latin alphabet."
“We thought about it and for a long time there was quite a big usage of so-called digraphs and trigraphs that combined two or three letters together to create some new sound. But it wasn’t very economical or practical."
“And in the 15th century a book was written called Orthographia Bohemica where the concept of diacritics was introduced. The book was probably written by the famous Czech preacher Jan Hus, but we are not sure. And the concept itself took some time to develop, actually several centuries until the 19th century where it became commonly used.”
The key moment for Czech typography, however, did not occur until Czechoslovak independence in 1918:
“In the early 20th century, there was a movement called the National Style, which was inspired by French Cubism. But Czech designers tried to expand it to other media including architecture, furniture design, ceramics; and even typography, graphic design, book covers and posters. So they tried to apply those angular shapes to other media. And it ended up with very interesting results."
“Later on, they continued and there was an evolution to something called Rondocubism, round Cubism, where those rectangular forms were combined with rounded ones. And we do have quite a lot of interesting examples of this, in architecture for instance, there is the famous House of the Black Madonna, or the Legion Bank and so on."
“So when we founded the first Czechoslovak independent state in 1918, it was a matter of self-confidence to have some sort of national style.”
Filip Blažek told me about how this attempt at creating a national style soon gave way to the more varied modernist design trends emerging from the rest of Europe. But then came the Nazi and Soviet occupations – the infamous dates of 1938, 1948 and 1968 – which had a profound effect on artistic freedoms in Czechoslovakia:
“The tragic impact of the communist putsch from 1948 was the introduction of socialist realism, the Soviet style, which influenced architecture, art as well as graphic design. Of course many designers didn’t want to use this style for their work, for their book covers and so on."
“And fortunately in the 1950s, somehow they smuggled pieces of abstract art and other contemporary art forms into graphic design. And this was not banned by the regime, but somehow accepted."
“My impression is that because of the success of the Expo 58 international exhibition in Brussels – and we even call this style the Brussels Style – inspired by this fake propaganda pavilion that Czechoslovakia had at this World’s Fair, which pretended that Czechoslovakia was a modern and free country, which supports modern art.”
Martin Pecina concurred, telling me that printing quality was poor during the 1950s through the 1980s, despite some converse efforts at investing in the overall production of books:
“There were a lot of artists who were not allowed to display their works officially. So they entered some different creative fields to express themselves. Many of these moved to film poster designs and book covers and so on. This has led to many beautiful examples of abstract works on book covers or film posters.”
Which may help explain all those wonderfully creative 20th century Eastern European film posters of American films, as one example. For Filip Blažek, during the late 1980s, the dying days of the communist regime directly inspired his future career choices:
“I started even at elementary school. I was designing pixel fonts in the Commodore 64 8-bit computer. So you had a grid, 8x8 pixels and you had to squeeze all letters, including Czech diacritics, into this very small format. My father managed to smuggle in a Commodore 64 from West Germany. So we could use it at home. My father was a writer, and he used it for writing.”
Blažek was also active during the Velvet Revolution in November 1989, especially when Prague’s Mánes art centre building became an impromptu distribution centre for posters against the regime:
“Since the first days of the revolution, I was helping them to type certain documents on computer, because many people couldn’t yet use computers. And I also kept copies of every poster that came in, so I have a huge collection of Velvet Revolution posters.”
Many of which have been displayed at various exhibitions and even featured in a 2009 book, titled Plakáty Sametové revoluce or Posters of the Velvet Revolution.
One typography-related movement that has emerged since those days focuses on the detective work involved in cataloguing, digitising and bringing to the world afresh the countless historical typefaces used in the Czech lands, sometimes just for one-off storefronts, across the decades. It is a historical treasure trove that even inspires young Czech students of typography. Petra Dočekalová explains:
“All these letter forms were drawn by hand by artists – graphic designers we say today. They were hired for a specific commission and there was no intention to create a typeface. Such work was done not only for theatres but storefronts, companies. And these designers created original typefaces, even without thinking that later it could be a font."
“And today, because we have this software that can easily remake such drawn alphabets, we now have students wandering around the city recreating such signs as student fonts. And it is very nice, because, one day Divadlo Gong might be gone, the font used on it could outlive its original use.”
Prague’s Divadlo Gong theatre, with its vinyl record-like retro signage, is just such an example. I also asked Martin Pecina about whether such signage had necessarily required the creation of an entire font:
“In many cases, this will not be a typeface or a font, but was just signage. Usually this was done by a clever and experienced typographer and calligrapher. But you can take this take such examples as something worth of future study and work and you can expand it to the whole alphabet. Many fonts are actually done this way today.”
Petra Dočekalová has been deeply involved in the work of archiving and digitising fonts:
“We did this project about Oldřich Menhart (1897-1962) and the Briefcase Type Foundry. And we very carefully went to the archives to seek and look for hidden treasures. Old sketches, not eaten by rats. Or old treasures or drawings that were almost forgotten or lost."
“And you could discover typefaces that were fascinating, maybe in sketches, or maybe as a ghost sign. And you decide that this typeface deserves to live again, and deserved to be digitised in order to be used and remembered for the future."
“So you scan the drawing, then you digitise it in professional software, and create a font that is fully functional. Maybe you overdraw some flaws, or redraw it better for contemporary use. And then you can release it as an open-type font that everybody can use.”
In 2015, Petra Dočekalová published another key work, namely Typo 9010, an award-winning English-language book covering the history of Czech typefaces from 1990-2010. The book documented the roughly 400 typefaces created by almost 100 Czech type designers during those 20 years:
“It was detective work. Going through old magazines, archives, books, finding out who created what when they were students. And then begging them, asking them, to provide all of their typefaces.”
And what of the future? The Czech Republic now has around 25 foundries selling typefaces globally, a far cry from 20 years prior when Storm Type Foundry was the dominant force. Filip Blažek explained the unique and growing appeal of Czech-made typefaces:
“Stephen Coles is a respected American theoretician of typography from the Letter Form Archive [a San Francisco-based typography museum]. And his answer was that there is a certain humour, certain attempt to experiment, or to ignore all existing values, or openness to reconsidering certain letter shapes and letter forms [in Czech typography]."
“Perhaps this is because the tradition is not that long. So we don’t have to follow three or four hundred years of history of type design. Because we started in the early 20th century, when different styles were melding together, we could use this as a starting point and do whatever we wanted.”
