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Type A
Frantisek Storm's devotion to his craft is changing
the face of Central European typography
By
Evan Rail
STAFF WRITER
And now for the fine print -- or at least the man who designs it.
Frantisek Storm works in a spacious, if spartan, Prague 6 studio. Before him, a super-oversize flat-screen monitor and a high-end Macintosh computer squat on his desk. Behind him, a type sample from the Baroque era hangs on his office wall.
It is no exaggeration to say that Storm is a bridge -- most obviously, between the typographic past and the high-tech future. He takes classic typefaces, or fonts, and turns them into computerized Central European (CE) typefaces, complete with all the necessary accents and diacritical markings for languages ranging from Czech to Hungarian.
It may seem obscure -- literally. But for anyone who cares about this ubiquitous art form, technology has been a mixed blessing. Originally composed of individual metal letters set by hand, type is now computerized, digitized and produced en masse. And therein lies a number of problems.
"Technology did a lot of bad things to type," Storm says. "It straightened lines and cooled things. But when typefaces were cut from metal, the lines were curved, not straight -- like nature, but more human."
Part of Storm's mission is to rectify those problems. A true artisan, he often goes back to the original versions of type, hunting them down from obscure sources and resurrecting them digitally. He is a one-man bulwark against homogeneity, Westernization and the forces of dullness and conformity. And his work has taken root in an impressive number of places.
In person, Storm, 35, is as individualistic as the type he creates. He drinks his loose-leaf oolong tea from a small, Asian-style bowl. And he rolls his own shag tobacco cigarettes to fuel his work.
In conversation, he comes off as simultaneously humble and self-assured. Complimented on his version of a typeface called Jannon, Storm brushes it aside. "That's Jannon, not me," he says.
One minute later, he's pointing out how he changed a celebrated typeface by Vojtech Preissig, modifying the angles of some of the letters and dropping the serif. "I corrected some of the mistakes," he says.
The 1925 Czechoslovak font by Preissig, a Czech designer famous for the courses he taught in American universities, offers a good example of the fastidiousness Storm brings to his craft. He sought out the original characters in a larger size, which allowed him to draw the letters with a subtle difference.
The artisan's eye
"There are other versions of this font, produced in America," he says. "But they're too straight. I've seen the original drawings of Preissig and the practice of straight lines was not so pure."
To the trained eye, that's only one of the problems created when CE typefaces are designed by computer companies in the West. Diacritical markings are often slammed on top of typefaces as an afterthought, with little regard for harmony of design.
For Storm, the ubiquitous Times New Roman typeface -- designed for the London Times in 1931 by Stanley Morison -- is a particularly egregious example of a font that has been "negligently adjusted to local conditions."
Apparently, the editors at the Czech daily Lidove noviny agreed. They asked Storm to design a new typeface to replace their standard CE version of Times. But after a short trial, Lidove noviny balked, choosing to stay with their older, established -- if slightly ungainly -- typeface.
"They actually wanted a new typeface," Storm says. "But then they didn't want to change it." After Storm and Lidove noviny parted ways, he decided to make the font, called Lido, available free of charge on the Web.
Other customers have embraced Storm's fonts. These range from large advertising agencies to small press publications. The cultural revue Revolver uses a Storm font, as does the student newspaper Babylon.
"Ad agencies buy one font for one campaign, for one billboard," he explains. "Small publishers may want to build a face for their publishing house, a kind of aesthetic face."
Storm stands in a long line of Czech designers, starting with early Czech stonecutters, running through Preissig and Josef Tyfa, who created a common Czech font of the early '60s. In his role as a digitizer of older fonts, Storm has helped bring other Czech designers into the computer age. He's made available two classic typefaces by Preissig. Storm's version of Tyfa's celebrated 1960s font is a current bestseller, and the two are now collaborating on another of Tyfa's fonts.
Storm created a different font in a traditional Czech style for the UNESCO memorial plaque on the Pilgrimage Church of St. John of Nepomuk in Zelena Hora. Called Aichel after church builder Jan Santini-Aichel, Storm's typeface is both weighty -- as befits a memorial -- and playful. He's done other plaques on architectural sites, including two on Prague's renowned Old Town Hall.
Part of the demand for Storm's typefaces stems from the effects of mass computerization. While regional type foundries once created unusual, individualistic fonts, many publications today use exactly the same typefaces. And very few quality typefaces come with Central European accents.
The smell of dung
Storm works to fix both problems. To begin, he's digitized a number of classic fonts that are often overloooked. And the best part for local publishers is that all of Storm's fonts have well-designed, seemingly integral Czech accents.
He has cut his own versions of Jannon, an elegant French typeface that for centuries was mistakenly called Garamond. And to digitize the Englishman John Baskerville's font of the mid-18th century, Storm tracked down a printed page in the Novy Hrady castle, part of the depository of the National Museum Library.
Naturally, that Baroque English font didn't come with a Czech hacek or krouzek. Storm added those, along with other Central European diacritical markings, with an aim to harmonize the Eastern diacritics with a Western design.
In addition to rescuing lost classic fonts, Storm creates his own designs, often with a local influence.
To create the strange typeface he calls Libcziowes, he drew inspiration from a 16th-century tombstone in Libceves, north Bohemia. As he writes in his type catalog, the tombstone attests to the fact that local typefaces of that era were wildly different from the Roman-style block letters of Western Europe.
Few people would take research to such an extreme, but Storm waves off any compliments. "That was not a very important project, just a small journey," he says.
Whenever he designs a brand-new typeface, Storm always starts by hand. "I have to draw the shapes, because the computer cannot give you the starting idea -- you have to start with a pencil."
Just a few letters are enough to give birth to an entire typeface. Like genetic material coded in a single cell, one word offers enough information for a designer to envision the entire alphabet -- the hanging edges of letters called serifs, the length of the ascenders and descenders, the ratio of small letters to tall ones known as the x-height.
Even Storm's descriptions of his fonts are particularly memorable. Regarding his Ideal Gothic, he writes: "The awkward curves of the italics are a little suggestive of openwork cast-iron products, or the bent iron of the decorative little railings in a Prague park."
Walbaum, based on a German font from the early 19th century, is one of Storm's newest creations. "The expression of the typeface is robust," he writes, "as if it had been seasoned with the spicy smell of the dung of Saxon cows somewhere near Weimar."
"I like working with ... anyone who
works with the
written word."
Frantisek Storm,
type designer
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Though Storm is fanatical about typefaces, he says that he can be conservative in putting them to use -- especially when asked to design for publishing houses.
"When I design books, my theory is no design," he says. "Many book covers today look like type catalogs."
But his designer's touch appears everywhere else -- in his catalogs, his sample posters and his griffin logo, which he cuts anew, each year, in wood. And he experiments constantly, condensing Roman capitals to create Mramor, removing Baskerville's serifs to create John Sans, altering the height of Pentagram's ascenders to make a more-legible Pentagraf.
For Storm, it all comes down to the simple act of reading.
"As a type designer, you put ideas into shape," he says. "I like working with editors, writers, poets, designers -- anyone who works with the written word."
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