Displaay’s first text typeface, Post, spans 4 families and 56 styles

Post is Displaay’s first text typeface. After more than a decade of releasing display fonts, the Prague-based foundry has put out something built for books, newspapers and magazines, and it carries a contrast axis that runs from typewriter styles at one end to a more antique-inspired form at the other, both living inside a single system. The collection grew out of a Master’s thesis by Viktor Mizera, who led the process from first sketch to release. The contrast axis is the answer to a question Mizera kept circling back to during his research. Studying text and typewriter fonts made in the second half of the 20th century, he noticed how much the two had in common, despite being separate categories. “This led me to ponder whether there might be a technological barrier that persists in the digital age, and if so, whether I should challenge this notion and ask myself: what if the typewriter and a text typeface are essentially the same thing?” he tells us. Post is his answer to that thesis. The first sketch, however, came from a less deliberate place. Mizera found a pixelated, glitched-out version of Courier reproduced in Nicolas Bourriaud’s book Postproduction, and at the start, he wasn’t sure it was worth pursuing. The scanner had thickened parts of the letters more or less at random, exaggerating the features that aren’t necessarily focused on legibility. But the type still worked. “Not pretty, but readable,” as he puts it. The puzzle of why a degraded form remained legible sent him into research on which parts of a letter a reader actually depends on, which then became the foundation on which the typeface was built.