A unique dry transfer alphabet back to life
Bron is based on Zelek, designed in the 70s by Polish type designer Bronisław Zelek. This typeface was originally made for dry transfer lettering sheets. It has been drawn following the principles of impossible geometry and is derived from simple geometric forms (perfect circles, triangles and squares). It is has been carefully redrawn and updated and is now available for contemporary technology and design. Use Bron’s rounded and smooth optical shapes in your headlines, logos, packagings, posters to instantly attract attention. This style offer two separate layered fonts to make your own awesome two color compositions. These can be used separately to create even more subtle effects. Bron is packed with an extended character set, supporting Central, Western and Eastern European languages.
Bron has been drawn with the utmost care in the finest details for perfect rendering in print and on-screen use. As a result, details like inconsistent sharp tips commonly found in Bron’s letter shapes have been beveled for superior accuracy and reproducibility for print and screen.
The most exciting part was to create all the glyphs non-existent in the old, original character set. Accented letters, multilingual letters, @ sign, Euro sign, etc.
Zelek’s design has previously been revived, right?
—Yes, it did. Zelek Black has been first revived by Simon Griffin as a bespoke font for the exclusive use and launch of UK edition of Wired magazine in 2009. The revival was based on a showing found under the name of ‘Zorro’ in an old Typaedia font catalog.
—Yes, it did. Zelek Black has been first revived by Simon Griffin as a bespoke font for the exclusive use and launch of UK edition of Wired magazine in 2009. The revival was based on a showing found under the name of ‘Zorro’ in an old Typaedia font catalog.
Zelek has also been digitized by Dick Pape in 2010 and released as a freebie. It has been generated by scanning an old Dover alphabet catalog and then auto-traced on the computer. See below what's the result of auto-generated fonts compared to a proper, manual drawing.
Bron Black has been completely redrawn point by point, curve by curve. Original rub-down sheets with big and detailed letters and original type catalogs were used as a source for the revival. See by yourself the difference between the new Bron Black and the auto-traced Zelek (click on the image for a larger preview). Due to its geometrical shapes, inlines and fine details, this typeface deserved the most proper and accurate curves drawing.
During my researches, I eventually found some old in-use examples of Zelek. This particular example below is from an old poster ad by Atari for the launch of their best seller product at the time, the Pin-Pong machine. The ad is dated 1974, the year when Steve Jobs was working at Atari.
The in-use example above was a semi-outline version of Zelek. It is called Bron Shadline and you can get it at the beginning of this post !
