About ITC Tyfa Book Italic
The original metal face of Czech artist and designer Josef Tyfa's eponymous design was cut for Linotype and was released in Czechoslovakia in 1959 by Grafotechna. It was inspired by the work of architect P.L. Nervi, whose courage and elegance Tyfa admired. “In the past,” says Tyfa, “type design was primarily based on the esthetic values of the faces; mine were inspired by the forms of modern architecture.” Frantisek Storm, who began digitizing the typeface under Tyfa's direction in the autumn of 1995, feels the design shows “a little touch of baroque typography.” In structure it's a modern-style typeface, with a vertical axis, a pronounced difference between thick and thin strokes, and thin serifs with no bracket joining them to the stems. But the curves and the variations of thick and thin show an exuberance far beyond most neoclassical “modern” types. The italic, especially, is almost elastic in its changing forms, with little round balls terminating some of the almost-swash thin strokes. While it's certainly possible to see the influences and echoes of older Czech type designers, such as Oldrich Menhart, in Tyfa's work, ITC Tyfa is not a “national” type design but an international one with a distinctive character all its own. |
