Details are a type designer’s raw material. Their subtlety is only made visible when they resonate across contours, letters, and words. It takes a special kind of talent to fashion one’s artistic opinion into forms that are primarily intended to carry meaning. When done well, characters become truly multi-modal and offer content together with a unique ambience. A trace of a designer lingers in each letter. It could be a quaint sense of humour, precision, outlook, taste.
Anna Štepanovská has woven Butik into a Didonesque, high-contrast fabric unifying extreme weights and widths where influences from mannerist ornamentation, to Herb Lubalin, to Josef Týfa coalesce into a refreshing new voice.
The semi-seriffed forms and pronounced ink-traps define the canvas for Butik’s personality in which the letterforms traverse between the extremes. Daring ball terminals and outstrokes dance between the letters in the subtle thin weights, while playful counters and the flared and tapered strokes grab the stage in the ardent heavies and bolds.
Graphic designers will appreciate a lot of small but practical considerations. Butik’s slender serifs join smoothly to create surprising continuity and patterns. The heavier weights feature shorter serifs, making them more headline-ready. Because each weight remains consistent from the Condensed to Extended widths, fitting the content in a given space should not be problem. The capitals, with their impressive staccato of stems, exhibit consistent height across all of the styles — thus easily combining however desired in titles and logos. Additional hairline diacritics and selected punctuation are offered as a stylistic set. Fractions come in two versions as well: with a diagonal slash as well as nut fractions with a horizontal bar. And on top of all of that Butik’s decorative ligatures, swashes, and alternates allow for endless creative possibilities.
And this all seems to be just a beginning.
