Interview with Peter Bilak for www.grafika.cz
(by Filip Blazek) fall 2000

Born in Czechoslovakia. Before moving to the Netherlands, he worked and studied in Slovakia, England, France and USA. Author of two books (Illegibility 1995, Transparency 1997), designer of fonts distributed by FontShop International and Linotype. Works mainly with typography and new media, and is a member of editorial boards of several design focused magazines. Together with Stuart Bailey and Jürgen Albrecht, he is the founding editor of dot dot dot graphic design / visual culture magazine. In 1999, Bilak started Typotheque foundry.
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Peter, you won the prize for the Eureka typefaces family at the Binenale Brno this year. Can you tell me the sources of your inspiration and reason to create these typefaces?
Eureka originated in 1995, when I was studying in Atelier National de Création Typographique in Paris. I had a time and possibility to seriously study type design with distinguished professors. At that time, I already knew I wanted to make typeface for an upcoming book project. The typeface was to be set in English and Slovak, and I wanted to use a single face. I realised that since the linguistic differences and typographic appearance of those languages is so different; I will need a specific solution. The x-height in most western fonts is too large, and a typeface is therefore unable to accommodate adequate punctuation. The accents have to be necessarily too small. Slovak is the language that uses most accented letters from all Latin based languages.To get the desired type rhythm in the text, proportions of the typeface were adjusted. I made relatively small x-height which in return leaves room for longer descenders and ascenders. More importantly, this room accommodates accents and punctuation, whilst giving the typeface a distinctive character.

How did you become interested in type design in the first place?
I started drawing letters out of pure interest in letter forms. I found them immensely beautiful, and i was wondering if I can change them whilst keeping the inherent beauty. That was before Fontographer. When I got a first version of Fontographer to my hands, it was decided.

How did FontShop include your fonts into the catalogue?
In 1992, I made series of linocuts, scanned them, digitised them and assembled to a font. Once it was a computer font (FF Craft), I was fascinated how i could control leading, spacing, everything... You see, i had no understanding of hot metal typography, so all this was very new to me. A friend of mine, Andrej Krátky, at that time already heard of an unknown company called FontShop and recommended me to send the fonts there. So I did. It took another two years before the font was released. Since then, everything was much easier, I met other type designers, and created more fonts for FontShop.

Why have you started your own type distributing company Typotheque then?
Well, I always believed in alternatives. In the meantime, FontShop became almost monopoly in the type scene. They doing big business these days, which is great, but I thought it was important to have something else then FontShops - something more flexible and friendly.
The other reason was that I, and some other friends had fonts which were made for specific purposes, but we never made them publicly available. Typotheque was an opportunity.

Is there any reason to create new fonts today? There are so many small type foundries around the world…
Of course. Can you imagine someone would say that there is already enough books or music records? It is part of our cultural heritage. There are other reasons as well. Fonts are usually made for custom jobs and are very much connected to the available technology. Since the very first movable type to the latest WAP screens. So it makes sense that there are so many new fonts as we facing many new technologies. There is no doubt that the number of new fonts will only increase. Of course, with the democratisation of technology, most of the newly created fonts is crap, but there is also a small percentage of beautiful, carefully designed fonts. Same like in music or fashion...

You specialise in creating both, Western European and Central European fonts. It is known, that most of designers in Central European countries do not pay for fonts. Where are your clients from?
Because of my roots, I always wanted to make my font in both encodings. Large companies ignore this market, but I think it is important to offer people quality fonts also in the Central/Eastern Europe. The truth, however is, that nearly all my clients are coming from countries like England, The Netherlands or France. It is probably now only for nostalgic reasons; that I do CE/EE, nevertheless, I will keep supporting my fonts with both encodings.

Are you going to change your type format to OpenType in the nearest future?
Evolution of typography is fairly slow process, and i think it will take some time before there will be a real demand of OpenType. Then, I will have to offer the entire collection also in new formats. But then, I don't even know what the future of Typotheque is.

You are editor of dot-dot-dot. What do readers think about this magazine?
Surprisingly, despite attracting more critical audience, we only had a positive reactions. 90% of the first issue is sold out now, and it seems that out assumption that there was a gap in the current design publishing was right. Our readership seems to appreciate our energy and determination in doing the magazine. It is something that a serious publisher would never undertake to do, and for a couple of individuals it just takes enormous amount of time, energy and also financial resources to put an issue together. A magazine publishing 2000 copies can never make any profits. We have lot of thing to say, so I personally am looking forward to second, third... issues. I hope we keep the support of our readers, without them we could never publish this magazine.

Last question, can you tell me few fonts, you like at most?
hmmmm... I am not a person that would use same fonts all the time. There is so many beautiful fonts out there. Instead of fonts, I'll give you some names of creators that I admire: Gerard Unger, Peter Matthias Nordzij, Letterror, Fred Smeijers, to mention a few.