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Reputations: Peter Bilak
‘I have more reasons to make fonts than ever … typeface design is a cumulative process, there are more possible entry points, more references, more inspiration than ever before. As with books, when you engage in reading, it points to more books … you might appreciate the ones you read early on more, because of your new understanding.’
In the quiet back streets near The Hague’s harbour, in a former school building, is the studio of Typotheque, the type foundry and design practice begun in 1999 by Peter Bilak. Since then, Typotheque has produced a continuously evolving catalogue of typefaces and developed innovative ways of sampling and consuming them. The studio also publishes articles on type and design, sells books and magazines, and produces T-shirts, diaries and other material developed from and made with the typefaces.
Bilak also works as a graphic designer for cultural and commercial clients: perhaps his most visible work in Holland is a series of stamp designs for the Dutch Royal Mail that manages to reference tulips, Mondrian and the history of Dutch type design through no more than glyphs and their bodies.
In parallel with this he makes projects for contemporary dance, writes, curates, gives lectures and teaches. The range of Bilak’s work may be a product of his early experiences – a sense of multiple narratives. He says: ‘I am not really able to argue strongly for any single idea, I usually see the opposing view at the same time.’
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Mark Thomson: What has influenced your work?
Peter Bilak: I think the biggest influences were places where I lived. I was born in Czechoslovakia, and when I was sixteen, the regime changed. Many things I was taught in school turned out to be half-truths. I learned how easy is to manipulate information, that there are very few things to take for granted. I started at the Art Academy in Bratislava, studied briefly in the UK and US, and then went to Atelier national de création typographique in Paris and the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Netherlands. Those places had a big influence on me, and always made me question what I knew already…
MT: How did you get into type design?
PB: I’ve always been interested in text, doing a bit of writing, and interested in design and designing printed matter, so designing type fell naturally somewhere in between.
At the beginning, I didn’t separate it from other work. I had this naive idea of absolute authorship – designing type for the essay I would write, for the book I was designing. But later I became interested in seeing what others might do with those typefaces.
[…]
MT: Around the same time as Typotheque, Stuart Bailey and you started Dot Dot Dot magazine, which started as a design magazine but quickly moved off into other areas.
PB: When we started DDD, we were very self-conscious, and did a lot of research into the history of design magazines, how they started, how they finished, which became the pilot issue. By the second issue we relaxed. If subjects as diverse as music, language, film, art, mathematics, literature occur in our work, where we have to become temporary experts on them, why not bring this variety to a magazine made by designers? It would not be a magazine showing visual outcomes of the design process, but presenting the recurring themes of our daily work. Changing the way of thinking from ‘what a design magazine should show’ to what we are interested in as designers was quite liberating.
[…]
MT: One of the more unusual elements in your work is dance.
PB: Dance is comparable to typography because both rely on rhythm and harmony, but at the same time you could say that they are almost the opposite of each other.
Dance relies on live performance; once it has been recorded it is no longer dance but a work of video, photography, or just documentation.
Type, on the other hand, needs to be reproduced to be defined as typography, otherwise it is just graffiti, handwriting or lettering.
MT: The idea of unitary constructions describing movement, something fluid and temporal, is similar to the relationship of the elements of type to written / printed language, and of language to the ideas it forms. The DanceWriter utility is an explicit statement of that relationship.
PB: A few years back I made a Web page playing with an idea from Abeceda, the book by Vítězslav Nezval and Karel Teige. It uses a video recording of a dancer who performs movements that can be read as letters, and you can compose a message and send it as an email. A recipient sees a video of a dancer dancing the message.
Recently, I made a new version of DanceWriter, a larger installation for the exhibition ‘Quick, quick, slow’, curated by Emily King in Lisbon’s Experimenta Design, and realised that although the DanceWriter installation is using dance, it is technically a piece of typography. I created a database of pre-recorded movements which are retrieved on request by the user. Just like Gerrit Noordzij’s definition of typography as ‘writing with prefabricated letters’.
[…]
MT: How does the studio work, given the variety of disciplines you are engaged in?
PB: I used to do almost everything myself, from programming to accounting; now I am happy to know the right people for the things I am not best at…
MT: Do you have a business model?
PB: Not really. Elaborate business planning rarely works…
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MT: Do you think there will be a moment when the market for fonts is saturated?
PB: If I relate it to my personal experience with typeface design, I have more reasons to make fonts than ever…
MT: The idea of History originated in a proposal for public communications; it didn’t go through but it was nevertheless an interesting idea, something between appropriation of the history of type and, conversely, a negation of the design idea of appropriateness.
PB: Right. In 2002 I was invited to take part in the international competition for the design of the typeface for the Twin Cities. Instead of proposing a single new typeface for St Paul and Minneapolis, I presented the idea of a typeface system inspired by the evolution of typography, a conceptual typeface that reused existing fonts. This would be linked to the computer’s calendar and, using a predefined database of fonts, present a different font every day.
For example, one day it would use the forms of Garamond but the next day, when you opened the same document, it would be in a new typeface, say Granjon, that was created more recently than Garamond. The idea was that the constant changes would confront the user with the continuous development of typography. The brief of the project was to bring people more awareness of typography. I just didn’t think it would be possible to do this by making new forms.
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MT: Another Typotheque utility is the Web Font Service, which enables designers, finally, to use custom fonts on the Web.
PB: Although there were ways to use custom fonts on the Web before, they all involved some complicated hacking, or converting fonts to images. This changed in 2009, when most browsers implemented a way to use remote fonts installed on servers. But that also means that fonts can be very easily copied from websites, and that’s why there was a lot of resistance from type foundries.
To run our type foundry, we rely completely on the internet. The Web allowed us to distribute our work directly, bypassing the traditional distribution methods. That is why we found it important to support use of our fonts online, rather than just in print. Until last year we simply had to disallow embedding fonts in websites – this is still what other foundries do.
MT: How does the font service work?
PB: Users can create a subsetted version of one of our fonts…
MT: How does the licensing and pricing work?
PB: If someone has bought fonts from us in the past, they can use the Web service free for those particular fonts…
With Web fonts the process of licensing changes, so there will be new business models. Instead of seeing fonts as software, the fonts could sell like music – where the author’s compensation depends on how popular the font is. In print it was impossible to know how people use fonts; on the Web, there are precise statistics of the font usage.
Or type could be a service, like in the old days, rather than a product, so users would purchase a monthly subscription.
MT: That would require another complete change of orientation from both suppliers and users.
PB: We’ve already seen changes like this. When type was material, one would not buy metal punches or phototypesetting films, but the service itself. The change from service to product happened only recently when fonts became digital. History tells us that suppliers who failed to react to these changes don’t exist any more. |
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