Rezak

Designed by Anya Danilova. Released 2022.

Rezak is a tribute to substance and dynamism, with display, text, and incised styles undergirding each other. Its distinct tone and rhythmic aesthetic allows it to function as something naïve or emotional, but always invigorating.

See Rezak Cyrillic here.
  • Winner of Gerard Unger Scholarship 2020
  • TDC Certificate of Typographic Excellence
  • Silver at ED-awards 2023
     

Bajki, ślady dawno minionego świata

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Dla nas są czymś normalnym, poczciwym, dokładnie oswojonym. Jednak w rzeczywistości bajki to posłańcy okrutnych i bezwzględnych czasów.

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Once there was a hardworking girl with a wicked stepmother and a heart of gold. She got a makeover from a fairy godmother, scored a dance with a prince, and snagged a happily ever after in a pretty sweet castle. This story crossed the globe for thousands of years, winning hearts wherever it went. Although the most familiar version of “Cinderella” was recorded by 17th-century French writer Charles Perrault, the well-respected scholarly website Sur La Lune Fairy Tales estimates there may be as many as 1,500 traditional variants of the tale around the world.

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Plenty of fairy tale stories have animal helpers, but in this one, the animal is the star. Puss is a bold, swaggering trickster who masquerades as the servant of a great nobleman. The story was probably first recorded in 16th-century Italy, but Puss seems to have acquired his swashbuckling boots about 100 years later in France, in the same book of stories that features Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Beauty and the Beast, and he’s been rocking them ever since. In an age when the poor mostly went barefoot, shoes were an important status symbol, and clearly those boots were made for walking because Puss has managed to travel astonishingly far around the world.

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The Backstory

Rezak

A jaunty, dynamic type family that stretches beyond one specific font category and use.

Nothing is hidden in the simplistic forms and overt aesthetic of Anya Danilova’s Rezak font family. Rezak is not a type family directly from the digital world, but was inspired by the stout presence of cutting letters out of tangible material: paper, stone, and wood. With only a few cuts, the shapes remain dark and simple. With more cuts, the shapes become lighter and more defined, resulting in a dynamic type family not stuck within one specific category.

The Black and medium weights began as one approach before separating into display and text categories. The four text weights were created through pendulum swings in design direction that experimented with contrast, angles, tangent redirections, and the amount of anomalies allowed. The text weights are vocal when set larger than ten points and subtle at smaller sizes. The tech-heavy Incised display style came last, employing a surprising range of trigonometric functions to make it behave exactly as desired. Its look can result in something distinctive and emotional or completely over-the-top.

Most normal typefaces change only in thickness; Rezak changes in intention, highlighting the relationship between dark and light, presence and absence, what’s removed and what remains. Rezak’s Black and Incised display styles are like a shaft of light in reverse and are perfect in situations of impact: websites, headlines and large text, gaming, call-outs, posters, and packaging. The tone works for something from youthful or craft-oriented to organic and natural products. Try these two in logotypes, complex print layering, branding, and words-as-pattern for greater experimentation.

The text styles are bold, energetic, well informed, and round out the family with four weights (Regular, Semibold, Bold, Extrabold) and matching italics for a family grand total of ten. These jaunty styles work well in children’s books, call-outs, movie titles, and subheads for myriad subjects such as architecture, coffee, nature, cooking, and other rough-and-tumble purposes.

Rezak’s crunchy letters are meant to expose rough, daring, or dramatic text. A further benefit is that this family is not sequestered within one specific genre or script, so it can be easily interpreted for other scripts, such as its current Latin and extended Cyrillic which supports such neglected languages as Abkhaz, Itelmen, and Koryak. Rezak’s push toward creativity and innovation, with an eye on typography’s rich history, reinforces our foundry’s mission to publish invigorating forms at the highest function and widest applicability.

CREDITS
Lead design and concept
Anya Danilova

Supervision
Veronika Burian
José Scaglione

Engineering
Joancarles Casasin
 
Quality assurance
Azza Alameddine

Consultancy and proofreading
Vera Evstafieva (Cyrillic)

Graphic design
Elena Veguillas
Rabab Charafeddine
Felicia Priscillya

Icon designer
Luciana Sottini

Motion Design
Cecilia Brarda

Copywriting
Joshua Farmer