Font cover design

The magazine Font was founded at the end of 1991 by the graphic design studio Kafka design. From the birth of Font up until today Ondřej Kafka, Pavel Hrych, Vladimír Kolenský and Aleš Navrátil have persevered. Even though the first issue was modest in range, cheaply printed and its layout designed by the collective strength of all of the members of the editorial staff, soon the magazine had changed into an inimitable periodical with uniquely thought-out cover design, such as we had been accustomed to see before November 1989 in renowned international magazines such as Graphis, Novum Gebrauchsgraphik, Print, Idea and others. A redesign of the magazine, which was created and theoretically substantiated by one of the founders of the magazine, P. Hrych, a graduate of VŠUP (the studio of literary graphic design and fonts of Professor J. Solpera), brought upon a fundamental change to the appearance of Font beginning with issue 40. He replaced the up-to-then rectangular shape of the magazine logo with a new oval-shaped logo, retaining the negative form of the font, but locating it in an oval. The possibilities of free-form coloring allowed for freedom in the graphic design of covers, and at the same time the slogan: Font- the first graphics magazine was introduced. The design of covers, as an exclusive presentation space, is provided not only to well-known graphic designers, but also to students whose work had initially been published on the two-sided inside pages of the magazine. At the moment when presentation of the works of graphic designers replaced interviews with them inside, it also fell to them to create the design of covers in the signature area of the given issue of the magazine, most often based on a theme. A review of the selection of student authors of Font covers over time shows that the majority of them have grown into outstanding figures of the Czech design scene. Covers originally graphically designed also produce exhibits of interesting, non-standard printing technology and materials (holography, six-color or metallic printing, thermal engraving, die cutting, embossing, scented dyes, handmade lithography, lens-form technology, etc.).