Designs of characters that are almost forty years old can be already restored like a historical alphabet – by transferring them exactly into the computer with all their details. But, of course, it would not be Josef Tyfa, if he did not redesign the entire alphabet, and to such an extent that all that has remained from the original was practically the name. Tyfa published a sans-serif alphabet under the title Juvenis already in the second half of the past century. The type face had a large x-height of lower-case letters, a rather economizing design and one-sided serifs which were very daring for their time. In 1979 Tyfa returned to the idea of Juvenis, modified the letter “g” into a one-storey form, narrowed the design of the characters even further and added a bold and an inclined variant. This type face also shows the influence of Jaroslav Benda, evident in the open forms of the crotches of the diagonal strokes. Towards the end of 2001 the author presented a pile of tracing paper with dozens of variants of letter forms, but mainly with a new, more contemporary approach: the design is more open, the details softer, the figures and non-alphabetical characters in the entire set are more integral. The original intention to create a type face for printing children’s books thus became even more emphasized. Nevertheless, Juvenis with its new proportions far exceeds its original purpose. In the summer of 2002 we inserted all of this “into the machine” and designed new italics. The final computer form was completed in November 2002. All the twelve designs are divided into six variants of differing boldness with the corresponding italics. The darkness of the individual sizes does not increase linearly, but follows a curve which rises more steeply towards the boldest extreme. The human eye, on the contrary, perceives the darkening as a more fluent process, and the neighbouring designs are better graded. The x-height of lower-case letters is extraordinarily large, so that the printed type face in the size of nine points is perceived rather as “ten points” and at the same time the line spacing is not too dense. A further ingenious optical trick of Josef Tyfa is the figures, which are designed as moderately non-aligning ones. Thus an imaginary third horizontal is created in the proportional scheme of the entire type face family, which supports legibility and suitably supplements the original intention to create a children’s type face with elements of playfulness. The same applies to the overall soft expression of the alphabet. The serifs are varied; their balancing, however, is well-considered: the ascender of the lower-case “d” has no serif and the letter appears poor, while, for example, the letter “y”, or “x”, looks complicated. The only serif to be found in upper-case letters is in “J”, where it is used exclusively for the purpose of balancing the rounded descender. These anomalies, however, fit perfectly into the structure of any smoothly running text and shift Juvenis towards an original, contemporary expression. Tyfa also offers three alternative lower-case letters *. In the case of the letter “g” the designer follows the one-storey form he had contemplated in the eighties, while in “k” he returns to the Benda inspiration and in “u” adds a lower serif as a reminder of the calligraphic principle. It is above all the italics that are faithful to the tradition of handwritten lettering. The fairly complicated “k” is probably the strongest characteristic feature of Juvenis; all the diagonals in “z”, “v”, “w”, “y” are slightly flamboyant, and this also applies to the upper-case letters A, V, W, Y. Juvenis blends excellently with drawn illustrations, for it itself is modelled in a very creative way. Due to its unmistakable optical effect, however, it will find application not only in children’s literature, but also in orientation systems, on posters, in magazines and long short-stories.

ROARRR! THE STYLES -Pantera Pro is the most complete style, and although its default look is mono-rhythmic it gets really playful and crazy like the examples of the posters by just activating the Decorative Ligatures button in the Open-type Panel of Adobe Illustrator. However, I recommend using also the Glyphs Panel because there you'll find much more variants per letter. Pantera Pro is in fact, coded in a way the combination of thicknesses will always look fantastic. -Pantera Black Left, and Pantera Black Right are actually “lite” versions of Pantera Pro: They have very little Open-Type code, so what you see here is what you get. Pantera Black Left has its left strokes thick, while Pantera Black Right has its right strokes thick. -Pantera White is a lovely member in this family that looks lighter and airy, hence its name. With the feature Standard Ligatures activated (liga) the font gets very playful. -Pantera Caps is based on sign painters lettering and since it follows the same pointed brush rules as the other styles, it matches perfectly. -Pantera Claws like its name suggests, is a set of icons that were done by our dear panther. THE STORY It is said that typography can never be as expressive as calligraphy, but sometimes it can get close enough. I tend to think that calligraphic trials, in order to work well as potential fonts, need first to go through very strict filters before going digital: While calligraphy is synonym of freedom (once its rules are mastered), type-design, in the other hand, has its battlefield a little tighter and tougher. When I practice pointed brush lettering, there are so many things happening on the paper. And most of them are delicious. The ones who know my work may see that although many of my fonts are very expressive, my handmade brush trials are much more lively than them. With that in mind, this time I tried to go further and rescue more of those things that are lost in the process of thinking type when first sketches are calligraphic. I wondered if I could create something wild, hence its name Panther, by understanding the randomness that sometimes calligraphy conveys and turning it to something systemic: With Pantera, I created an ordered disorder. Like it happens a lot in many kinds of lettering styles, in order to enrich the written word the scribe mixes the thickness of the strokes and the width of the letters. Like one of my favorite mentors say (1), they make thoughtful gestures Some lively strokes go down with a thick, while some do that with a thin. Some letters are very narrow, meaning some of them will need to be very wide to compensate. Why not?. The calligrapher is always thinking on the following letters, and he/she designs in his head the combination of thicks and thins before he/she executes them. He/she knows the playful rhythm the words will have before writing them. It takes time and skill to master this and achieve graceful results. Going back to the font, in Pantera, this combination of varying thicknesses and widths of letters were Open-Type coded so the user will see satisfactory results by just enabling or disabling some buttons on the glyphs panel. I'm very pleased with the result since it’s not very easy to find fonts which play with the words' rhythm like Pantera does, following of course, a strong calligraphic base. I believe that if you were on the prowl for innovative fonts, this is your chance to go wild and get Pantera! NOTES (1) Phrase by Yves Leterme. In fact, it’s the title of a book by him. EPILOGUE Esta fuente está dedicada a mi panterita