Visual was born at a workshop at the end of October (2010), but spiritually is a double Gemini – full of hot takes and internal contradictions. Its exterior is systematic, adhering to a strict grid – rendering an appearance of re-booting back to an era of bitmap fonts – while its counters are organic – hacking the rules of the rest of its system. A fitting take on a raster font as today’s screens (obviously) no longer require the coarseness that Zuzana Licko had to work within for the first generations of personal computers (1985, Oakland¹), or perhaps an even earlier system from Giuseppe Salviati, who developed templates for cross stitch embroidery (1567, La Vera Perfettione del Disegno di varie sorti di recami²). Thus it is fitting that a (semi) pixel family released in 2023 is not limited to the constraints which defined previous eras. In Visual, the gradation of pixels follow in the same steps in each of its styles – the weight is increased through the width of the character, and the inner curves which form its counters enable the letterforms to become optically balanced.

A simple prompt resulted in a nuanced output – create something typographically new inspired by topographic maps, the goal to work through: ‘freely connecting the disciplines of typography and topography.’ The workshop resulted in a single weight and a poster after a 1-week workshop led by Áron Jancsó, Ján Filípek, and Ondrej Jób. In the initial steps of the workshop Jan Novák surfed the internet from Báhoň, SK to Chicago, USA – to catch a birds-eye view, of a zoo. Inspired by overlapping geometric and natural elements in a map of Lincoln Park Zoo, Jan developed a typeface inspired by these maps – not immediately sketched on screen, but developed first from drawings on paper. No longer limited by the historical design problem of adhering to a lo-res grid due to production constraints, the (then) advanced technology of Fontlab Studio 5.1 enabled Jan to create a typeface which had the characteristics of a pixel font but the dynamism of something new.