Typographia 2

The book designer Oldřich Hlavsa (1909-1995) was the guru of typography in the sixties and seventies, and was one of the few Czech designers who was well known abroad. He influenced an entire generation of graphic designers. In his key threevolume book Typograhia, a work that has yet to be surpassed, he summarised his innovative views on book design.

From the profession of a typesetter, Oldřich Hlavsa developed his artistic sensitivity through a long practice in printing industry, studying type history and avant-garde trends. He admired Teige’s constructivist ideas on one side, but also respected how Sutnar, Menhart and Muzika transfered tradition into modern design. In Hlavsa’s work, typography was conceived as a visual interpretation of the content. Hlavsa was a self-tought designer, and got a first major opportunity to experiment with illustrative typographic compositions as an artistic editor of the Plamen (Flame) magazine. Although Hlavsa has never been officially teaching, encouraged throughout his career by friend Ladislav Sutnar, he spread his knowledge in the typography manual Typografická písma latinková (1957), which was also published in English by New York’s Tudor Publishing as A book of Type and Design (1960). During the Czechoslovakia’s normalization period of the 1970s and 1980s, Hlavsa put his views and polygraphic experiences in a three volume book Typographia 1 (1976), Typographia 2 (1981), Typographia 3 (1986) that became an important reference for the Czech typographic and book culture.