The Heritage of Oldřich Menhart

To celebrate the heritage of Oldřich Menhart, Petra Docekalova and Tomas Brousil of the Briefcase Type Foundry in Prague decided to digitize his typefaces. In tribute to the 125th birthday of the Czech typographer, they released the digitizations of high-quality typefaces. Due to Menhart’s calligraphic talent and strong sense of typography, he crated an intriguing legacy.

His typefaces do not contain a straight line, but a whole series of imaginative forms and specific details. Nevertheless, Menhart’s typefaces were to be found in the briefs of many printers in the former Czechoslovakia. One of his lifelong goals was to enable others to experience Czech culture by creating typefaces especially designed for use in Czech. Petra Docekalova and Tomas Brousil did intensive research in museum archives and studied Menhart’s estate and correspondence. They also collected his prints and rare bibliophile works. This allowed them to gather enough background material for a high-quality digitization of his works. The result is the first five typefaces. Thus, they present you a book typeface, Figural, the large poster typeface Monument, the calligraphic typeface Parliament, Unciála, as the absolute pinnacle of Uncial design processing according to Petra Docekalova and Tomas Brousil, poster Gothic antiqua Vajgar.

The Heritage of Oldřich Menhart

Designers: Petra Docekalova and Tomas Brousil
Foundry: Briefcase Type Foundry 
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