Writing quotation marks, numbers, punctuation, spaces, or symbols is integral to every language. Specific typographic rules have been developed for each language for centuries, but in recent decades, they have been disregarded due to globalization and the unification of software tools.
The basis of this international cooperative project is to systematically describe the current typographic rules and practices of all 24 official EU languages, including minority languages, in the future, with the help of local professionals. This research aims to create a publicly accessible database of typographic rules, which will be followed by a web application for the general public as well as public and commercial institutions.
The presentation will introduce the cooperation plan and will show the pitfalls of a four-year research project at UMPRUM: The Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. It will present the ongoing struggle by traditional culture-specific typographic phenomena to move into the dynamically evolving virtual software environment and explain why we cannot (still) entrust such a task to AI.
Filip Blažek (1974) is a graphic designer, typographer, teacher and writer. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Charles University in Prague. Since the mid-1990s, he has been focused on Czech typeface design and typography and has lectured on these topics at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague and at ARCHIP, as well as at numerous Czech and international conferences. He is actively involved in graphic design in the Designiq studio, which he founded in 2002. He is the author of the publications Practical Typography (2000, together with Pavel Kočička) and Typokniha (2020) and has contributed to numerous other publications and periodicals.
Radek Sidun (1980) devotes himself primarily to fonts and typography. He’s served as a pedagogue at the Type Design and Typography studio of the UMPRUM Academy in Prague. He lectures on contemporary typography and its recent history at the same institution.
He co-founded Briefcase Type Foundry in 2012.
He is a member of the editorial team of the award-winning book TYPO9010 (2015), co-author of the book Jaroslav Benda 1882-1970: Typographic Design and Typeface (2019) and author of the publication Manual of Diacritics: Case studies of newly designed accents for contemporary typefaces (2021).
Filip Blažek 
Radek Sidun