This interview was conducted on the occasion of the visit of a Swiss graphic designer François Rappo in Prague in the spring of 2024. Radek Sidun from Briefcase Type Foundry asked questions related to the evolving landscape of the typographic industry and niche type foundries, but he was also interested in Rappo's opinion on historical periods, not only of the Czechoslovak production.
The BC Exalt typeface, created originally in 2014 as Filip Kraus's master's thesis, has an intriguing backstory. In this interview, Filip reflects on the origins of BC Exalt, delving into his creative process and the specific design choices that shaped the typeface. We discuss its place in the field of type design, where countless new fonts emerge. Despite being officially released in 2024, BC Exalt has made its way into various projects over the past decade and has already been unexpectedly used in different contexts.
As a new type of residential unit, the development of prefabricated housing estates also brought with them a negative phenomenon in the form of worsened orientation. The mutual similarity of the prefab buildings, the large distances between them, ground floors consisting of identical housing units instead of storefronts, frequent dead ends and the general blurring of the term “street” contributed to significant disorientation in these neighbourhoods. The developers of the Jižní Město II housing estate in Prague were the first to actively address this problem in practice. They succeeded in imprinting a uniqueness on a fundamentally monotonous environment not only with an unusual urban design but primarily with a comprehensive and highly sophisticated orientation system – one of a kind in the context of Czechoslovak housing estates.
April 20, 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of graphic designer and typographer Jiří Rathouský. Known primarily for his book designs and visual identities for companies and institutions — including building information systems — Rathouský also worked as a type designer, creating typefaces he often implemented directly in his designs.
