Peter Biľak

Peter Biľak (born 1973 in Czechoslovakia) is a Slovakian graphic and typeface designer, based in The Hague, The Netherlands. He works in the field of editorial, graphic, and type design, teaches typeface design at the postgraduate course Type&Media at the KABK, Royal Academy of Art (The Hague),.[1] He started Typotheque in 1999, Dot Dot Dot in 2000, Indian Type Foundry in 2009, Works That Work magazine in 2012, and Fontstand, in 2015. He is a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale.[2]) and lectures on his work internationally. He is a writer for numerous design magazines and frequently contributes writing and design to books and publications that include Print, Emigre, Eye (magazine), Items, tipoGrafica, Idea (magazine), Abitare and Page.

He has designed several fonts including FF Eureka (published by Fontshop) and Fedra (published by his own type foundry Typotheque). Presently, he is working on a broad range of cultural and commercial projects.

Bil’ak’s interest in each discipline extends beyond the practise of design to the inquisitive exploration of it.

Studies and influences

Bil’ak’s biggest influences were the places he has lived. He was born in Czechoslovakia, where the regime changed when he turned sixteen. He learned that many things he was taught in school turned out to be half-truths, and that it was easy is to manipulate information. He started art at the Art Academy in Bratislava, then studied briefly in the UK and US. Later, he went to Atelier National de Création Typographique in Paris to get his Masters, and Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Netherlands for his postgraduate laureate. Those places made him question what he already knew. Travelling during that time made him more independent and allowed him to see things from multiple perspectives.

As a student in Czechoslovakia, Bil’ak was often frustrated by the fact that his language wasn’t supported by most typefaces. Even though it’s a Latin-based script, “all the accents weren’t available for Czechoslovak,” he said. “I had to make my own letters to complete the fonts.” He went on to develop typefaces for Russian and Greek, but the real breakthrough came with Arabic—a language he knew nothing about. This became the roots of his type-designing career.

During his studies, he had very good teachers in including Irma Boom, Karel Martens, Armand Mevis, and Michael Rock.

Career and achievements

Biľak kicked off his career with international design agency, Studio Dumbar, before starting his studio in The Hague in 2001. Only after he started working on my own, the foundry/platform/shop he found in 1999 took off.

In 1999, Bil’ak established the type foundry Typotheque with the idea of digging out all the projects from the drawers and publishing them. Typotheque started with a single typeface. Typotheque not only made its typefaces Internet friendly, it supported them with a robust network of services. Fonts were hosted on remote cloud servers, and a license enabled users to access the fonts instead of downloading them entirely, thus protecting Typotheque’s work. This in itself was revolutionary for the time, but that wasn’t all. In October 2009, Typotheque, was the first in the world to license its entire font collection for the Internet. “Web fonts, as a concept, have existed for about fifteen years. But there was a lot of resistance from type foundries, because if you put something online, users could copy fonts freely from the browser,” Bil’ak said. “There’s also a lot of complexity behind what you actually see on the screen, given the different browsers, computer platforms, and versions of software.” Although there were some ways to use custom fonts on the web before, they all involved some complicated hacking, or converting fonts to images.

Because of his interest in languages, he worked with Indian designer Satya Rajpurohit on the Hindi version of Fedra, and two years later in 2009 started the Indian Type Foundry. He and Rajpurohit partnered with Rajesh Kejriwal, who had a paper distribution company and direct contact with designers in India. Just like Typotheque, ITF started out with a single typeface, but has larger plans to develop typefaces for Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, and Gujarati. It also has plans to organise lectures and workshops in India, and to publish typefaces made by local designers. As the first company to develop and distribute digital fonts in the country, it was a risky business from the start, given the culture of piracy in tech-savvy India and the general lack of understanding about font licensing. There was also the problem of software standards. “It’s incredible, considering that Adobe designs most of its software in India,” Bil’ak pointed out, “that it does not support Indian languages. This is crazy.” But ITF has had its share of successes. Prajavani, a major South Indian newspaper, has engaged the firm to create a custom typeface, something virtually unheard of in Indian publishing.

For his contribution to the non-Latin typography, he was named in 2012 one of the 12 Game Changers by Metropolis (architecture magazine).[3]

In 2014, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic awarded Biľak the Goodwill Envoy award [4] for the successful spreading of the good name of Slovakia abroad.

In 2015, Peter Biľak, together with Andrej Krátky co-founded Fontstand, a desktop app that allows trying fonts for free or renting them by the month, also referred to as iTunes for fonts.[5] Fontstand has been included[6] in the New Europe 100, a list of Central and Eastern Europe innovations that recognises those who - with their courage for innovation, expertise in emerging technologies, unique skills and social outreach - are having a global impact. New Europe 100 is organised by Res Publica together with Google, the Visegrad Fund, and in cooperation with the Financial Times.[7]

Typeface design

The task of creating well-designed fonts for the world’s languages seems Sisyphean in the digital age. But not for the typographer Peter Bil’ak. He has always been interested in text, writing, as well as design and designing printed matter. As a result, designing type fell naturally somewhere in between.

Bil’ak has been designing typefaces since the early 1990s. The most notable ones so far has been listed below.

Magazines

Between 2000 and 2007 Biľak was the co-founder (along with Stuart Bailey), co-editor, and designer of Dot Dot Dot, an art and design journal. Dot dot dot is a biannual, self- published, after-hours magazine, originally centred around graphic design, later broadening in scope to interdisciplinary journalism on subjects that affect the way we look at the world, how we think about and make design. It was not to be a magazine showing visual outcomes of the design process, but presenting the recurring themes of daily work. It was designed to change the way of thinking from ‘what a design magazine should show’ to ‘what we are interested in as designers’. After three issues, the tagline ‘graphic design/visual communication magazine’,was scrapped, since Bil’ak thought there was no reason why some things like film, music, literature should not be in the magazine. The only connection it has with graphic design is that the co-founders studied design. Now the magazine talks about other things, which maybe define design, because design is not self-enclosed — other disciplines are needed in order to define it.

In 2013, after raising €30.000 in a crowdfunding campaign,[8] Biľak founded Works That Work, a magazine of unexpected creativity, published twice a year by Typotheque, in print and digital edition. Works That Work is an international design magazine that looks beyond portfolios, dedicated to inspiration and observation — a kind of National Geographic of design. The British national daily newspaper The Guardian named Works That Work as ‘some of the best-looking new magazines’,[9] and Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University reported how ‘the small magazine has found a way to get noticed globally by creating a beautiful digital edition as well as a creative way to distribute its print copies—gaining a lot of ever-coveted user engagement in the process.’ .[10] Works That Work distributes 43% of its print run [11] via its innovative Social Distribution, a reader-based system of distribution of physical copies of magazine bypassing traditional distribution channels.[12]

Other projects

In 2003, he designed a series of the standard post stamps for the Dutch Royal mail (TNT Post), today one of the Icons of the Post.[13] The design of these standard postage stamps was inspired by the Dutch landscape, the starting point being the well-known view of geometric fields from the air, the first view of the country offered to any visitor landing at Amsterdam airport. Besides the inspiration coming from the landscape, the stamps offer another reading. The design is purely typographical, as the width of each letter determines the width of the surrounding block. This is how old-style metal printing works, setting metal punches next to each other. In this respect the stamps can be seen as a modest homage to the traditions of Dutch typography. The stamps have been reprinted three times already, totalling over 143 000 000 copies. The 2010 edition is slightly modified.

From 2004 he has been collaborating with the choreographer Lukáš Timulak on the concepts of dance performances. Together they were subject of an exhibition ‘InLoop/EnTry’ in Stroom, Centre for Art and Architecture.[14] Bil’ak defines the concept of the dance pieces, getting involved very early on in the process.While it is clear what Lukáš does as the choreographer, Bil’ak’s role has been defined in the theatre credits sometimes as designer, stage designer, sometimes as dramaturge, sometimes described simply by the noun ‘concept’.

Talks and lectures

Exhibitions

Notes

References

  1. ↑ Royal Academy of Art in The Hague
  2. ↑ Peter Bilak at AGI
  3. ↑ Metropolis Magazine: Peter Bilak, Game Changer
  4. ↑ Minister Lajčák presented Goodwill Envoy awards
  5. ↑ This New Service Wants to Be the iTunes for Fonts
  6. ↑ The New Europe 100, Fontstand founders
  7. ↑ The 2015 New Europe 100: sectors in the vanguard of change
  8. ↑ Works That Work press release
  9. ↑ The beautiful magazines setting out to prove print isn't dead
  10. ↑ In the Netherlands, a magazine experiments with “social distribution” (and they don’t mean retweets)
  11. ↑ First year of Works That Work magazine in numbers.
  12. ↑ Reader based distribution of magazine
  13. ↑ Iconen van de post
  14. ↑ Stroom,Centre for Art and Architecture

External links

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