The journal Font was established towards the end of 1991 by the Kafka Design graphic studio. In the general enthusiasm that followed upon the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the designers’ chief objective was to help readers find their way through the maze of the developing market economy, together with its booming digital technologies.
Such changes encouraged a wave of untrained amateurs to enter the realm of graphic design (until then known as "applied graphic art"), a field previously dominated by professionals. Font was the brainchild of Ondřej Kafka, Pavel Hrych, Vladimír Kolenský and Aleš Navrátil, who remain on its board to this day. Although the first issues were modest in scope, printed cheaply, with layouts created by all members of the staff in turns, the journal soon transformed itself into a remarkable periodical, with a unique cover design, something that had hitherto been the province of only renowned foreign journals such as Graphis, Novum Gebrauchsgraphik, Print, Idea and others. In addition to the originality of the cover design, the publishers of Font laid emphasis on the promotion of quality materials and new technologies on covers that might be perceived as "windows on the soul", gateways to the content of individual issues. The design of covers is only exceptionally provided by members of the Kafka Design studio. This exclusive promotion space is available to major graphic designers as well as to students, whose work was once published on a double-page spread within. When the presentation of designers' work inside the journal was replaced by interviews with them, the design of covers created by them became a precursor to the journal content, frequently dedicated to a particular theme. In retrospect, the careful selection of student artists designing Font covers demonstrates that the majority of them have evolved into prominent exponents of the Czech design scene. Originally designed covers feature samples of interesting, non-standard printing technologies and materials (holography, six-colour and metallic printing, thermogravure, cut-out, tooling, scented paints, manual lithography, lenticular technology, etc.). Apart from the promotion of modern technologies and new approaches to design, Font provides information on the history of design and advertising. As a result, covers occasionally feature historical reminiscences. The cover of Font 4/1997 is probably world-unique: it was printed as a classic lithograph from a hand-stone, with each copy subsequently manually numbered and signed by the artist, František Vlach. Another individual approach was introduced by the cover of Font 6/2003, printed employing digital technology. Not only did it bear the name of the subscriber, but the drawings on the covers were customized. If the subscriber was a man, there was a drawing of a boy after a shopping trolley icon; women had girls, companies a group of figures and Slovak subscribers a picture of Jánošík, Slovakia's "Robin Hood". The successful and much-sought-after cover of Font 2/2005 featured a morbid illustration by the artist known as T.O.T.T. ["Corpse"]. It featured a goggle-eyed Prague ratter (a small pinscher) biting into a torn-off girl's finger. The image was scraped into a black-painted area by Thomas Ott, a Swiss comics artist living in Zurich and Paris. The exhibition held on the premises of the Governor's Palace of the Moravian Gallery in Brno marks sixteen years of the cover design of a journal that, through artistic quality and technological originality, developed a reputation as one of the most interesting periodicals on graphic design.
