BC Novatica
In 2023, the entire Novatica family has been updated with a few minor changes. One of the biggest is the improvement of Cyrillic and the new export to Variable format, which allows users to smoothly adjust the weight and width of the typeface, making it even more versatile.
Novatica was created based on a commission from the Czech commercial television station Nova in 2007. Marek Pistora worked with Tomáš Brousil to create an alternative to a readable, simply designed sans. They naturally called the typeface Novatica. In 2014 TV Nova decided to abandon Novatica for good, and in so doing it released the exclusive licence it had been using. Novatica thus became a new typeface offered by Briefcase Type Foundry.
TV Nova has been able to make the most of a single typeface family and achieve typographic diversity throughout its channels.
TV Nova has been able to make the most of a single typeface family and achieve typographic diversity throughout its channels.
TV Nova has been able to make the most of a single typeface family and achieve typographic diversity throughout its channels.
Nova’s sports channel used narrow letter-spacing. This distinctive, contracted letter-spacing suits Novatica as a whole.
The typeface bears a slight hint of 1970s typography. It cleverly combines this essence with the almost timeless appearance of today’s popular grotesques, but still has a balanced character when compared to the popular Helvetica, for example. Novatica features a clearly readable design and pleasant width proportions.
Subtle ink traps are nearly invisible at normal sizes.
A text version was also created that changed the characteristic “nma” glyphs to more classical versions that would facilitate reading.
The Novatica family has a total of five weights, including strongly slanted italics.
One of its interesting assets are its embedded ink traps, primarily used to connect arches to stems. They are nearly invisible at normal sizes, but they brighten the skeleton quite nicely. In contrast, at larger sizes the ink traps become an interesting element. The missing projecting stem next to the shoulders in “n” and “m” is a typical feature. Given the character of the typeface, the single-story “a” is also pleasantly uncommon.
The family has a total of five weights, including strongly slanted italics. Novatica is a typeface with a seemingly simple typeface structure and broad range of possible applications.
Read more about czech typefaces for television here…
Design: Tomáš Brousil and Marek Pistora
Number of fonts in a family: 10 (Light, Light Italic, Regular, Italic, Medium, Medium Italic, Semibold, Semibold Italic, Bold, Bold Italic)
Number of glyphs per font: 494
Release date: 2017
Update date: 2023
OpenType Features:
Case Sensitive Forms (case)
Slashed Zero (zero)
Localized Forms (locl)
Ligatures (liga)
Stylistic Sets (salt ss01)
Lining Figures (lnum)
Tabular Figures (tnum)
Superscript Figures (sups)
Scientific Inferiors Figures (sinf)
Subscript Figures (subs)
Ordinals Figures (ordn)