Functionalism now! – Interview with Franciszek Otto
interview by: Andrzej Leraczyk

Notec is a font designed for the 3rd edition of the International Type Design Contest organized by a German company Linotype Library GmbH in 1999. Working on Notec was one of my first experiments in the program Fontographer. My intention was to create a dynamic font having the characteristics of my handwriting. I strengthened the dynamics of letters using as the tool a paintbrush turned upside down and dipped in ink. I made countless tests of shaping individual signs on coated paper. The characteristic element of the design was achieved by the tool-print, which made an oval blot when touching paper. What turned out to be most difficult was combining letters into pairs because of smooth joins between most of lower-case letters. The majority of minuscule letters finish at the same height (at about half of the height of the minuscule without ascenders or descenders), whereas the left side of a minuscule letter is “finished” . The letters not subject to this rule were: b, f, i, o, p, q, r, s, v, w and x. Unfortunately, when I was creating this typeface I did not yet know the Open Type format, allowing the use of alternative characters and ligatures. This problem was not encountered in the case of majuscules, since this is a set of detached characters.

The font Brda received an honourable mention in the 4th edition of the Linotype contest. This time, the première of the design took place in the regional newspaper Powiat, issued in the nakielski and bydgoski regions in the north of Poland, for which I have been working since 1998. I use Brda for typesetting headlines of advertisements and short information texts. The idea is based on characteristic cuts that appear in the case of handwritten typefaces in which a stick cut on the right side is used as a tool. The block typeface thus obtained has a sloping version. Apart from Brda, I sent also other designs to the competition. When I learnt about the honourable for Brda, I realized that the typeface could be extended by additional weights and that it could be transferred from the Category Display to the Category Text, which enables the typesetting of text with character emphasis. I created additional varieties – normal, italic, bold and bold italic – and sent them to Linotype. Before the distribution of awards, I received a licence agreement for the whole design, which was qualified to the Category Text, but on Linotype’s website Brda, as a commercial font, still functions as a Display typeface with the styles Extra Bold and Extra Bold Italic.

Successes in both editions of the contest gave me enormous satisfaction, the bigger since the jury was composed of distinguished letterers: Hermann Zapf, Ed Benguiat, Erick Spiekermann, Jill Bell, Akira Kobayashi, John Hudson, Gerard Unger. Such distinction boosts your confidence enormously and gives faith in your own abilities, though I realize that it was to a certain extent a coincidence and the fonts are not free from shortcomings.

Did Linotype have any remarks when introducing your typefaces to their catalogue? Did the company suggest any modifications?

Each time Linotype gave me about one month for corrections, without any suggestions whatsoever. The Germans changed the codepage of the fonts prepared for sale from MS Windows 1250 Eastern European to MS Windows 1252 Latin 1.

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