Peter Biľak

Peter Biľak (Slovak pronunciation: [ˈpeter ˈbiʎak]; born March 29, 1973) is a Slovak graphic and typeface designer based in The Hague, The Netherlands. He works in the field of editorial, graphic, and type design. He teaches typeface design at the postgraduate course Type&Media at the KABK, Royal Academy of Art (The Hague).[1] He started Typotheque in 1999, Dot Dot Dot in 2000 (with Stuart Bailey), Indian Type Foundry in 2009, Works That Work magazine in 2012, and Fontstand in 2015. He is a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale.[2]) and lectures on his work internationally. He is a writer for numerous design magazines and frequently contributes writing and designs to publications including Print, Emigre, Eye (magazine), Items, tipoGrafica, Idea (magazine), Abitare, and Page.

Peter Biľak
Peter Biľak in 2013
Born (1973-03-29) March 29, 1973
Occupation(s)Typeface designer, graphic designer
Websitepeterbilak.com
Signature
Peter Bil'ak at Typo Berlin 2017

He has designed several fonts including FF Eureka (published by Fontshop) and Fedra (published by his own type foundry Typotheque). He works on a broad range of cultural and commercial projects and his interest in each discipline extends beyond the practice of design to the inquisitive exploration of it.

Early life

Biľak was born in Czechoslovakia. He initially studied at the Art Academy in Bratislava, then studied briefly in the United Kingdom and the United States. Later, he went to Atelier National de Création Typographique in Paris, where he obtained his Master's degree, and Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands for his postgraduate laureate.

Career

Biľak started his career with an international design agency named Studio Dumbar in The Hague, where he worked from 1999 to 2001. After leaving Studio Dumbar, he started working independently.

In 1999, Biľak established the type foundry Typotheque. Originally starting with a single typeface, Typotheque then published articles, book reviews and interviews with other designers. Typotheque's office[3] is in the Zeeheldenkwartier neighborhood of The Hague.[4]

Typotheque's webfont service uses @font-face rule in CSS, and serves the appropriate font file to different browsers, from their network of distributed servers.

Because of his interest in languages, Bil'ak worked in 2007 with Indian designer Satya Rajpurohit on the Hindi version of Fedra Sans, and in 2009 started the Indian Type Foundry (ITF). Similar to Typotheque, ITF started out with a single typeface, but plans to expand its typefaces for all Indian writing scripts such as Devanagari, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada and Malayalam. It also plans to organize lectures and workshops in India, and to publish typefaces made by local designers. Prajavani, a major South Indian newspaper, has engaged the firm to create a custom typeface.[5] Since then, ITF has created fonts for several multinational companies such as Google, Apple, Sony, Samsung, and Amazon.

In 2012, he was named as one of Metropolis' 12 Game Changers, due to his contribution to non-Latin typography.[6]

In 2014, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic awarded Biľak the Goodwill Envoy award for spreading the good reputation of Slovakia in an exceptional manner.[7]

Together with Kristyan Sarkis, a Lebanese designer based in the Netherlands, Biľak co-founded TPTQ Arabic, a sister company that develops original Arabic typefaces and systems for bilingual typography.[8]

In 2015, Peter Biľak, together with Andrej Krátky co-founded Fontstand, a desktop app that allows users to try fonts for free or rent them per month, also referred to as the "iTunes for Fonts".[9] Fontstand has been included in the New Europe 100, a list of Central and Eastern Europe innovations that recognizes those with expertise in emerging technologies, unique skills and social outreach which have had a global impact.[10]

In 2019 he was awarded the Gold Prize in the European Design Awards for his font "Ping", a typeface that supported hundreds of Latin based languages, and 10 non-Latin languages.[11]

Typeface design
Poem by M. Vasalis on a wall in The Hague using the typeface "Lava" by Peter Biľak

Since the early 1990s, Biľak has designed several different typefaces:

Magazines

Between 2000 and 2007, Biľak was the co-founder (along with Stuart Bailey), co-editor, and designer of Dot Dot Dot, an art and design journal. It discontinued publication in 2010.

In 2013, after raising €30,000 in a crowdfunding campaign,[12] Biľak founded Works That Work, a creativity-focused magazine, which was published twice a year by Typotheque. It was published in print and in a digital format. Works That Work was an international design magazine whose goal was to study international graphic design. The magazine received several positive reviews during its time in publication. For example, the British national daily newspaper The Guardian named Works That Work as "[one] of the best-looking new magazines",[13] and Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University reported that "the small magazine has found a way to get noticed globally by creating a beautiful digital edition as well as a creative way to distribute its print copies—gaining a lot of ever-coveted user engagement in the process." [14] Works That Work distributed 43% of its print run via 'Social Distribution', a reader-based system of distribution of physical copies of the magazine that bypasses traditional distribution channels.[15][16] Works That Work was discontinued after 10 issues in 2018.[17]

Other projects

In 2003, Bil'ak designed a series of standard post stamps for the Dutch Royal Mail (TNT Post), which today stand as one its icons.[18]

Since 2004, Bul'ak has collaborated with the choreographer Lukáš Timulak on the concepts of dance performances. Together they were the subject of an exhibition 'InLoop/EnTry' in Stroom, Centre for Art and Architecture.[19]

Exhibitions
  • Typo en Mouvement. Le lieu du design, Paris, 2015
  • Memory Palace. Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2013
  • Call for Type. Neue Schriften. Gutenberg Museum, Mainz, 2013
  • All Possible Futures. SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco, 2013
  • Bewegte Schrift / Type in Motion. Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, 2011
  • Connecting Concepts. National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India, 2011
  • van Grote waarde – Icon van de post. De Affiche Galerij (Poster Gallery), The Hague, 2011
  • Cartografias do Processo. Lisbon, Palácio Quintela, 2011
  • Deep Surface: Contemporary Ornament and Pattern. CAM Raleigh, 2011
  • Graphic Design: Now in Production. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2011
  • Open Projects. 21e Festival international de l'affiche et du graphisme de Chaumont, 2010
  • InLoop/EnTry: Peter Bilak & Lukáš Timulak. Stroom Den Haag, 2010
  • Quick Quick Slow. Experimenta Lisbon, 2009
  • Freedom and Order, Quattro Grafici Olandesi. ISEA Urbino, Italy, 2008
  • Doubles Pages. Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, 2008
  • Multiverso. Torino, 2008
  • Schrift in Form. Klingspor-Museums Offenbach, 2008
  • Experiment and Typography. Brno, Prague, The Hague, Bratislava, Warsaw, Ljubljana, Budapest, 2006
  • Communicate: British Independent Graphic Design since the Sixties. Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2006
  • Work from Mars. in 2006
  • The Future's bright. VIVID Design Rotterdam, NL, 2005
  • Czech and Slovak Poster Art 1993–2003. Poster Museum Aarhus, Denmark, 2003
  • Reading in Motion. 34th Zagreb Salon, Croatia, 1999

Notes
  • Typed Radio interview with Peter Biľak
  • Progetto Grafico No.9, 2007, interview with Peter Biľak
  • Articles by Peter Biľak
  • Middendorp, Jan, Dutch Type. 010 publishers: 2004. ISBN 90-6450-460-1.
  • Eye magazine No.75, Spring 2010, Interview with Peter Biľak
  • Designing for India, Bangalore Mirror, 6 February 2011
  • Heller, Steven, The Design Entrepreneur Rockport Publishers:2008. ISBN 978-1-59253-421-0.
  • Interview with designer Peter Bilak
  • Peter Bil'ak: Designing for dance, typefaces, and marginalized alphabets

References
  1. [1] Royal Academy of Art in The Hague
  2. [2] Archived 2012-01-07 at the Wayback Machine Peter Bilak at AGI
  3. "The Hague Neighborhood Map". Hoodmaps. Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  4. "Typotheque | LinkedIn". nl.linkedin.com. Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  5. [3] Print, June 2011, vol 65, issue 3, p.52
  6. [4] Archived 2012-02-03 at the Wayback Machine Metropolis Magazine: Peter Bilak, Game Changer
  7. [5] Archived 2014-12-04 at the Wayback Machine Minister Lajčák presented Goodwill Envoy awards
  8. "TPTQ Arabic: A New Foundry". tptq-arabic.com. Retrieved 2023-09-21.
  9. Hohenadel, Kristin (2015-05-22). "This New Service Wants to Be the iTunes for Fonts". Slate. ISSN 1091-2339. Retrieved 2023-09-21.
  10. [8] Archived 2015-12-04 at the Wayback Machine The New Europe 100, Fontstand founders
  11. "26 Nederlandse European Design Awards 2019". MarketingTribune (in Dutch). Retrieved 2023-09-21.
  12. "And it's here! (Works That Work magazine)". worksthatwork.com. Retrieved 2023-09-21.
  13. O'Reilly, John (2014-02-16). "The beautiful magazines setting out to prove print isn't dead". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712. Retrieved 2023-09-21.
  14. "In the Netherlands, a magazine experiments with "social distribution" (and they don't mean retweets)". Nieman Lab. Retrieved 2023-09-21.
  15. "State of the Magazine (Works That Work magazine)". worksthatwork.com. Retrieved 2023-09-21.
  16. "Reader based distribution of the magazine (Works That Work magazine)". worksthatwork.com. Retrieved 2023-09-21.
  17. Citation Needed
  18. [15] Iconen van de post
  19. "Stroom Den Haag - InLoop/EnTry: Peter Bilak & Lukáš Timulak". www.stroom.nl. Retrieved 2023-09-21.
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