Storm Type Foundry Information

I thought it might be useful to describe the beginnings and development of my type founding and my way of becoming a type-designer out of a graphic designer. In 1991 I ended up my studies on the AAAD in Prague in the studio of prof. Jan Solpera. In those times my colleagues, young Czech graphic designers, and I witnessed the end of the analogue era in all parts of design. We used to hand our final layouts to a client or a printing factory as paper reflective collage or just outline drawing. When scans were needed, each slide had to be put in a transparent jacket marked by desired size and crop commands. When it comes to typography, we were limited to a short font list of a specific printer. The typefaces in phototypesetting technology were usually poorly rendered revivals of classical originals, whereas the display typefaces on matrices used in titling units were slightly better. These were built on the principle of a photographic magnifier machine, where the letters were placed on a negative strip. Staromat and Starlettograph were the names of the precious German instruments I was lucky to own for some time. Letters were exposed on photographic paper previously "activated" by liquid developer in order to show the picture immediately after exposition. Designing a book, poster or musical cover was not only exciting work, but also a mysterious experience under the amber light in the silence of a darkroom. After the collapse of the iron curtain, computers arrived to our eastern territory, but with primitive typographic tools and renderings of typefaces back then were suddenly many steps backward in comparison to previous phototypesetting technology not to mention the wonderful letterpress even earlier. The resolution of first laserprinters brought unacceptable deformations to text-sized letters and the reading experience was horrible not only to the trained eye of a typographer but for ordinary readers too. The only fun to be had at the time came from when designing fanzines or posters in combination with ...