CGD

Following the successful Briefcase Type Foundry project, which was nominated for the Czech Grand Design Award last year, typographer and designer Tomáš Brousil, in collaboration with Petra Dočekalová, Zuzana Lednická and Radek Sidun, presents a publication that charts original Czech typefaces from 1990 to 2010. "Basically, the publication highlights four active generations of typographers, ranging from prof. Jan Solpera, František Štorm and Marek Pistora to current students of typefaces and typography," says Petra Dočekalová in an interview with h70.cz. Appearances can be deceiving since Typo 9010 is a publication that is literally a "lightweight" read, in the positive sense of the word of course. The project invites the reader to explore a concise chronological archive of typefaces - a font zoo. The surprise, though, is the ease with which the reader can browse this archive of Czech typefaces from the last twenty years while linking various formal experiments into a coherent whole. Its contents are put together in a very elegant way, with hundreds of typefaces presented in texts that tell the story of Czech graphic design and typography in the wake of the Velvet Revolution. The texts alternate with pages that sum up the most important events in individual years, giving the typefaces context. The book documents, in a very unique way, the transformation of the applied graphic arts into graphic design and the technological changes, experiments and typefaces that make up the alpha and omega of graphic design.

Kateřina Přidalová