Nikola Djurek

NIKOLA DJUREK THE FUN TYPE OF

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NIKOLA DJUREK was born in Zabok, Croatia. Djurek studied in Croatia, Italy and in The Netherlands in the postgraduate master course in Type and Media, Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, and he earned his PhD degree in the graphic and type design fields. He now teaches at Art Academy – DVK, University of Split and University of Zagreb.

Additionally, Nikola is the Croatian country delegate for ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale), the organization of the international type community.

He is also collaborating with Typotheque (Peter and Johanna Bilak) on the development of new typefaces.

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INTERVIEW Which letter do you design first?

I don’t really have a letter that I design first. I first think about construction (translation, expansion), proportion, contrast, and then I begin to make sketches in the way that I prefer; it can be a different letter each time, but it’s usually a lowercase letter, and then maybe two caps just to gauge the proportions.

Can you tell us something about type design in Croatia?

Typography and type design are not on a particularly high level in Croatia, and that’s mostly because, until recently, we didn’t have any education in this field; so that’s why I went to Italy and later to The Hague, because I really wanted to study typography and type design.

What do you like best and least about designing type?

I really like type design, and there really are few things I dislike (correcting things can be painful sometimes, because in most cases it’s a never-ending story). But I really like to do calligraphy, stone carving, making sketches, digitalize, and to use Python which really speeds things up — mostly in the production phase of font development.

What’s your inspiration in type design and in life?

Lots of things inspire me: signs in the city, old posters, nice books, the sea, the hill that I’m living on. It’s hard to say — probably everything that surrounds me. In type design my biggest inspiration is, probably, the Den Haag scene and the great designers from there, especially teacher and designer Gerrit Noordzij. I’m quite connected with The Hague (friends and teachers).

What do you do besides type design?

As I mentioned before, I’m teaching at the University and at the Academy of Art. I also do graphic design (mainly books and book covers), and I have several hobbies: playing drums and trumpet, taking photos of everything, and spending time in the family vineyard (helping and learning how to make perfect white and grey Pinot).

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Typonine is a digital type foundry and graphic design studio, witch was founded by Djurek in 2005.

Typonine is also a name of difrent style types.

Uncomplicated and legible, Typonine Sans is the quintessential, contemporary humanist sans serif. Its five weights, two widths, and mammoth character set are ideal for all kinds of texts. It is a part of a larger family that also includes Typonine Sans Condensed, Typonine Sans Monospace & Typonine Sans Hairline.

Typonine Stencil is an unusual take on industrial letterforms. The family’s burly finesse overturns the notion that such letterforms only belong to wooden crates and cartons, rugged sites and atmospheres. It’s meant for headlines, signage, and custom lettering – uses for which its two widths and three weights are perfect.

By now, Djurek made: -Typonine Sans, -Typonine Sans Condensed, -T9 Sans Mono, -T9 Sans Hairline, -Typonine Stencil

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DELVARD

This poster is made with silk screen and was made by Djurek in 2010. He was inspired by the TV show named Seinfeld and its character Frank Costanza.

About the type: The poster was based on type Delevard. Named after a famous cabaret performer, Delvard – in its details and proportions – is an entirely new series of fonts for text and display. Though the typefaces Nikola Djurek designs and licenses on this site are striking and versatile, Delvard clearly draws from an historic movement: the sinuous curves, geometries, and couplings of late nineteenth-century Art Nouveau.

Delvard’s letterforms are based on a charming, handwritten note that reads: "Proportion: 1:50, Month of March 1905" from which Djurek fashioned a set of capitals showcasing the shears, elevated crossbars, and angled segments associated with the typefaces and lettering of the period. Included are contextual alternates that substitute standard capitals for those with swash terminals or elongated strokes. There are also raised small capitals and characters that automatically fuse or nestle.

The lowercase letterforms and small capitals Djurek drew from scratch dispel notions that Delvard is just a display face. Though somewhat mannered, their stature, ample widths, large counters, squarish bowls and curves make for extremely readable, low-contrast text fonts equipped with an assortment of numerals (e.g., old style and tabular old style, proportional lining and tabular lining, small cap; superiors, inferiors, numerators, denominators, etc.) and characters that support Central and Western European languages based on the Latin alphabet. As if these were not enough, Djurek also drew a series of display fonts: Display One through Five and Fat, for users who must set vivid, forceful, or saucy strings of text.

By now Djurek has made a big veriety of Delevard styles: - Delvard, - Delvard Condensed, - Delvard Display.

- Delvard Gradient.

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MARLENE This poster is made with silks creen and it was made by Djurek in 2012. He used glyphs of Marlene Stancile in very easy but efective way.

About the type: Marlene is a sharp and efficient text typeface in five weights whose robust yet elegant features make it an ideal choice for books, newspapers, and magazines – it’s a state of the art Modern.

Marlene is an elegant, high contrast Egyptian face with a distinctive and contemporary calligraphic flourish. When I first saw it I was impressed at how incredibly crisp it was, as if drawn with a pen so sharp it could just as easily cut the paper as leave ink there. The italic expresses this sharpness with a wonderful sense of speed; those beautiful thin upstrokes and unusually high connection points of the bowls on a, g and y, and the standout exuberance of the k feel as if it can’t wait to get you moving on to the next letter, with the stark horizontal of the terminal serif seemingly flinging you onward. The horizontal serifs along the x-height and baseline also create strong lines that add yet more of a sense of urgency and pace to text set with it. This face isn’t hanging around for anyone.

Stenciled letters are not new, but Marlene Stencil is unlike any other display face. Though it consists of letters whose strokes, curves, and branches have been strategically excised to correspond with industrial letters, its 18th century features and whirling swashes more than make up for their absence. Partly inspired by the engraved penmanship of the Englishman George Bickham, the resplendent Marlene Stencil is a contemporary display face in every sense of the word; the logical capstone of the Marlene typeface system.

Marlene Stencil boasts a quintet of alternate swashes per glyph; it includes ligatures, indices, and international currencies.

By now Djurek has made a big veriety of Marlene styles: - Marlene, - Marlene High, - Marlene Stencil, - Marlene Display.

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BALKAN SANS This poster is made with silk screen and it was made by Djurek in 2012. He used new type of his, Balkan Sans.

About the type: Balkan* is a new typeface system that consists of Latin and Cyrillic scripts.

It is based on the study of a phenomenon known as Balkan sprachbund**, a term used to describe neighboring languages whose sound and grammatical features have merged because of their proximity. The typeface system also represents an attempt to identify the features shared by some South Slavic languages and alphabets like Bosnian, Montenegrian, Croatian and Serbian.

We focused on the dual-literacy that characterizes Slavic peoples, many of whom use and transliterate both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. Historically, there were three scripts in this region: Cyrillic, Latin and Glagolitic. The use of Latin and Cyrillic typifies the former Yugoslavian countries, today’s Serbia, Bosnia and Hercegovina as well as Montenegro.

Historically, both scripts in this region were bearers of cultural, ethnic, religious and political identities, but their communicative and symbolic functions were often out of step just for the sake of multi-ethnicity. On the other hand, close development of languages and scripts throughout history resulted in shared properties. Today some regional languages in the Western Balkans are so similar that they can even be thought of as dialects.

The Balkan typeface system is a series of fonts that decodes Latin and Cyrillic; it demystifies, depoliticizes and reconciles them for the sake of education, tolerance and, above all, communication. Though Balkan is a “font” in the usual sense, it can also be used to translate Croatian Latin into Serbian Cyrillic and vice versa. One could therefore think of the fonts as educational software capable of reconciling discrete scripts.

Like all OpenType fonts, Balkan can be expanded to include the Russian, Macedonian and Bulgarian alphabets.

Balkan Sans and Balkan Sans Stencil consist of four styles – three of them have different alignments (e.g., all uppercase characters are Latin and lowercase characters are Cyrillic) and one style consists of uppercase Cyrillic and lowercase Latin characters.

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