Type design

Calligraphic strokes applied to a solid structure of grotesque typeface.  

Type design in process. 

Obsidium

Cooperation: Veronika Opatrná, Oleg Zářecký, Iveta Holešová, Yana Korzhova, Nikola Valentová 

Obsidium was inspired by the font Hollar created by Oldřich Menhart (* 25. June 1897, † 11. February 1962), who was an excellent Czech typographer, graphic designer and publicist. He was the most productive in the first half of 20th century, creating successful and well-known fonts such as: Figural, Menhart antiqua or Menhart Romana.

This font has a bit harsher look, for it has been created with a non-professional equipment by a famous printer Jaroslav Picka. The original sketches were not preserved as they were destroyed during the process. It was an uphill battle to get any materials to base our work on. In the end a few letters of this font were found in poems by Jaroslav Seifert. Even with this in hand creating Obsidium demanded careful and deliberate work to decide which features are worth keeping and which should be modernized. The name Obsidium is based on the works of Jaroslav Seifert, who wrote about stones in his poems.

Obsidium stands out for being fragile yet stiff at the same time, sharp yet noble and gentle. It is easily recognized for its sharp upper ascenders, a system of boldly differing but harmonized serifs or by its perfectly balanced dynamic calligraphic features, therefore it is suitable even for longer texts typesetting. Last but not least it contains a legacy of the Czechoslovak type-scene. 

www.interpretype.gd1.cz/projects/obsidium