History, Typotheque’s Multi-Layer Type System, Now Supports Greek and Cyrillic

7 Nov 2013

New fontsUpdates

History is a project that began even before Typotheque was founded in 1999. Early experiments with a layered, modular type system began as far back as 1994, but it was not until 2004 that Peter Biľak developed the idea into a completely functional system.

History was designed around a base of Roman inscriptional capitals, and includes 21 independent typefaces which can be selectively combined in layers. These elements span a wide variety of types including humanist renaissance, transitional, baroque, script-like, early grotesque, 19th century vernacular and digital, but all share widths and other metric information for maximum compatibility. A sophisticated web application enables designers to choose and order the layers, as well as to assign colour and transparency to each, producing an immense number of unique styles. For more information, please see the design concept and The History of History article.

The Latin version was published in 2009 and became very popular, as our gallery of fonts in use demonstrates. Four years later, we are happy to announce the completion of a project that started almost 20 years ago, and to offer History Cyrillic and Greek, which were designed by Ilya Ruderman.