Skolar is a robust text typeface designed to address the needs of serious typography. It has been used extensively across diverse platforms and purposes. Skolar’s letterforms follow conventional proportions allowing for comfortable reading. It maintains credibility while incorporating a subtle personal style.
Features such as its relatively large x-height, robust serifs, and low contrast make Skolar a reliable choice even at small sizes and for the most complex editorial and academic text settings. Skolar’s vast character set caters for over two hundred languages and various transliterations (Pinyin, Sanskrit) using Latin, Cyrillic, Greek (incl. polytonic), Devanagari, and Gujarati scripts.
Designed by: David Březina, Vaibhav Singh (Devanagari)
Published: 2008–12
Language support:
Cyrillic (39 languages)
Devanagari (34 languages)
Gujarati (3 languages)
Greek (2 languages)
Latin (123 languages)
Transliterations (31 languages)
David Březina is the managing director at Rosetta. While you may know him as the designer of the award-winning type family Skolar, he has also worked on custom typefaces for Adobe, Linotype (Monotype), Microsoft, Google, and others. So far, he has designed typefaces for Cyrillic, Greek, Gujarati, Devanagari, and various extensions of Latin. David holds a Master’s degree in computer science from Masaryk University in Brno (Czechia) and an MA in Typeface Design and PhD from the University of Reading (UK). His cross-disciplinary PhD thesis studied visual similarity and coherence of characters in typefaces for continuous reading in Latin, Cyrillic, and Devanagari scripts.
He has also been actively involved in writing, presenting, and conducting workshops on type and typography around the world.
Vaibhav Singh is an independent typographer and type designer from India. He received a bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the University of Pune and a master’s in Visual Communication from IDC, IIT Bombay. He was a recipient of the Felix scholarship in 2010 for his MA in Typeface Design, and again in 2013 for his PhD research, both at the University of Reading.
Having worked as a typographer and exhibition designer in Mumbai, Delhi, and Panjim, he now specialises in designing typefaces for north Indian scripts. In addition to developing fonts, he has been researching aspects of the typography of Devanagari and its implications for print cultures in India – for which he has received fellowships from The Printing Historical Society, UK, and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC.
| Light drawings : | Anna Giedryś |
|---|---|
| Extrabold drawing : | Elena Schneider |
| Cyrillic consultancy : | Alexandra Korolkova |
| Greek consultancy : | Irene Vlachou |
| Greek consultancy : | Gerry Leonidas |
| Devanagari & Gujarati consultancy : | Fiona Ross |
| Hinting : | Sláva Jevčinová |
Vangard is a refreshing sight in the world of law firm identities. Skolar is being used to full effect here, in a clean design with a strong colour theme, combining yellow with black and white illustrations. The identity was developed by labor b studio, and won the iF communication design award and the DDC Award in 2014.
Popular resource for everything web, Smashing magazine has been redesigned by Elliot Jay Stocks, using Skolar by David Březina for the headlines and intros, and Proxima Nova by Mark Simonson for the text. Smashing magazine also uses Skolar for its conferences, books, and workshops – in print as well as on digital platforms.
Polish publishing house Karakter recently published a book Widzieć/Wiedzieć, an anthology of the most important texts about design, edited by Przemek Dębowski and Jacek Mrowczyk. Seminal essays by almost forty authors have been translated into Polish, some of them for the first time. Texts by El Lissitzky, Jan Tschichold, Beatrice Warde, Paul Rand, Gerard Unger, Paul Stiff, and many others are typeset in Skolar. Yay!
8 Faces magazine conceived a limited edition of eight A3 (297mm x 420mm) artwork prints. David Březina designed print #1 using his typeface Skolar. The poster is the logical next step from the promotional poster designed for TypeTogether. While the first poster is about a single typeface and its features, this poster is about typeface design in general. It describes the basics behind “proportions”, “structures”, “modulation”, and “rhythm” in type design.
This book arose from the invitation to mount a substantial exhibition at the ATypI conference in Hong Kong in 2012. It was published by the St Bride Foundation and contains essays by renowned specialists in the field of non-Latin type design, with lots of unique material from the Non-Latin Type Collection at the University of Reading. The exhibition was curated by Fiona Ross and Vaibhav Singh, who also edited the book. It was designed by Vaibhav Singh and Paul Luna and the text is set in Skolar.
Get your copy from St Bride Library shop.
An established series of books on Linguistics by the etymological department of The Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic were redesigned by Vít Boček and David Březina in 2010. Notably, an extended custom version of Skolar was developed in six weights in order to typeset the books efficiently.
The generous layouts count on the complexity of academic texts, great amount of footnotes, and readers who have the urge to make notes while reading. The cover plays with the idea of boustrophedon writing as a reference to antiquity, the age in which everything had been said already!
Quipsologies a sub-blog of UnderConsideration uses Skolar as well as several other webfonts.
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