RONNA PENNER
Ronna Penner lives and works about an hour outside of Toronto. Her day job is designing typefaces and making fonts, while she fills her evenings designing digital scrapbook kits—images, backgrounds, and fonts for the scrapbooking industry. While some professional designers may look down their noses at scrapbooking, providing tools to this community serves an important creative outlet for Penner. “Typeface design is a wonderful way to express myself,” she says, “but it lacks color. I am visually oriented and need to see more exciting things than black lettering. Scrapbooking and typeface design mesh perfectly for me.”

Penner began her career as a graphic designer and for a while worked in the greeting card industry as a concept designer. Here, according to her, she “learned the ins and outs of Photoshop while honing typographic and color skills.”

Type became an important part of her work and she was “always on the lookout for new and unusual typefaces.” In fact, when she was unable to find exactly the right typeface for a particular project, she designed her own—and hasn’t looked back since.

Penner’s first commercial typeface, Sketchley—a swashy, free-flowing design inspired by a handwriting sample—was a bit of a lark. “I sent my first complete font to Bitstream just to see what would happen,” she recalls. “They were not only accepted as part of their 2002 New Font Collection, the design was also a winner in the bukva:raz! competition.” After this initial success she thought there might be a market for more of her work. Penner’s company, Typadelic Fonts, was born out of this idea and she has enjoyed success since it was first founded in 2002. Today, there are over 50 fonts in the Typadelic library. While most are designs based on handwriting or script lettering, they range from the stylized —and delightfully quirky—Inkster, to lighthearted designs like Frivolous and Velvet Script. Typefaces like Garden Party and Jot are breezy interpretations of Roman characters’ shapes, and Sweetheart Script is an almost—but not quite—formal connecting script.www.typadelic.com

OLIVERA STOJADINOVIC
Olivera Stojadinovic’s first interests were in the exact sciences. It was only logical that she attend a technical college and study mechanical engineering. While she labored diligently at her studies, Olivera began to discover that it was the arts—not engineering—that was her love. It was a difficult decision, but she abandoned her studies before receiving her engineering degree and enrolled at the Faculty of Applied Arts at Belgrade University. Here, she studied lettering and printmaking.

Calligraphy also became an important aspect of her work and study. These endeavors were much more in keeping with Stojadinovic’s sensibilities. She blossomed and graduated with honors in 1985. Shortly after graduation, Stojadinovic took part in a project to reconstruct 19th-century Cyrillic book typefaces. This work included researching antique books available at National Library, taking careful photographs of the printed pages, and reproducing the historic typefaces. Later she joined the Center for Art and Scienti fic Research at the University of Arts in Belgrade. Here, her earlier interest in things technical complemented her artistic skills as she learned to use the computer as a typeface design tool. While at the Center, she was part of a team researching the origins of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet and developing new Cyrillic typefaces.

At the same time, Stojadinovic began working with a small publishing house creating a special series of books under the “Masterpieces” brand. Part of the design brief was to draw a new set of initial letters for each book. Once Stojadinovic had drawn the majority of the capital letters, she realized that a companion lowercase would make a distinctive script typeface. The first fonts were Cyrillic alphabets, but Stojadinovic decided to also create Latin sets—which later became ITC Aspera, Rastko, and Hedera. These were followed by Resavska, a large “super” family of serif and sans serif typefaces based on a proposal for the redesign of Serbian currency. Stojadinovic’s newest design, Anima, will be released early in 2006.

MIRA VUCKO
Mira Vucko lives, works, and was educated in Zagreb, Croatia. She lived in France and Sweden in her twenties, but returned to Croatia to work as a graphic designer for the country’s largest newspaper. It was here that her passion for type and typography was born. Vucko has since gone on to become one of Croatia’s leading graphic designers, and has won many awards for her advertising and packaging design.

During her years working as a designer, Vucko created a range of trademarks, logotypes, and packaging for many of the largest companies in Croatia. Since she is also a trained calligrapher, it was only natural that she try her hand at typeface design. Vucko drew her first typeface before desktop publishing and design software made the craft widely accessible. Unfortunately, there was also little interest in typeface design in Croatia and the designs were relegated to “personal” expressions. She was alone with her love of typeface design and turned to the more “acceptable” letter arts of calligraphy and handlettering. Even today Vucko laments, “If you ask me what I wanted to be, the answer would be a lettering artist and calligrapher, but there is not a need for such a narrow specialty in my country.”

It has just been recently that her lettering—and now typeface design—has been seen outside Croatia. Her first commercial typeface, Needlescript, was released by ITC in the fall. Ironically, for all her unfulfilled labors in previous attempts at typeface design, this one was “designed in one breath … I was using a calligraphy nib and was drawing the alphabet without much thought,” she explains. “When I allowed the down strokes of a couple of letters to fall below the baseline, I realized that I had created the impression of movement. I kept drawing letters in this fashion and did the same with horizontal lines. I added a firm ending to the descenders and the first characters that were to become Needlescript emerged.” Mira’s next typeface, Agramer, is a more traditional connecting script due to be released in 2006.