PREAMBLE | Typeface design exhibition by students from the National Academy of Art in Sofia and the Burgas Branch
2025.06.13
20–27 June 2025
Opening: 20 June 2025, 6:00 pm, WASHINGTON Hall
12 George Washington Street, 3rd floor, Sofia
The exhibition PREAMBLE presents digital typeface projects of 12 first- and second-year students from the Department of Book, Illustration, Printed Graphics at the National Academy of Art in Sofia and the Burgas Branch, whose teacher is Assoc. Prof. Iliya Gruev, PhD.
Participating students
Anton Nankov and Bettina Tsvetkova, Alexandrina Koteva, Amalia Mochi, Bozhidara Ivanova, Viktoriya Ivanova, Dessislava Zaharieva, Yoana Khachikyan, Kaloyan Kamenopolski, Kristiana Petrova, Meri Raykova and Tina Mihaylova
The quite interesting, and in some cases remarkable achievements of the students prompted the organising of this chamber exhibition, so that these, albeit early works would not remain unnoticed by a wider audience.
The thirteen works are authorship interpretations of assigned educational tasks formulated in stylistic and morphological frameworks. In the first year, the topic is related to the recreation of a historical model–the Roman Capitalis Monumentalis–built with a flat pen on an inclined axis in a two-line writing system and composed of capital letters. In the second year, the topic is broader and more creatively defined – axis-less fonts in all their nuances, with the task being complicated by the introducing the problem of lowercase letters and their organising in the five-line system.
Apart from the mandatory requirements for the functioning of a font such as the constructive and tone homogeneity, the proportional and formal relationships between all characters, the stylistic consistency in a number of details as well as the spatial dimensions between the graphic elements created to a greater or lesser extent successfully, the most important thing is to note the individual creative approach of each artist to the assigned topics.
Friedrich Schiller said that the font gives body and voice to the silent thought. It is wonderful that all the presented students have a clearly distinguishable individual voice. Let us hope that at least some of these talented artists will devote at least part of their creative interests and efforts in the future to enriching the Bulgarian graphic culture in terms of the most important expressive means of graphic communication–the font.
Working hours of WASHINGTON Hall: every day, 1:00 pm – 6:00 pm