By way of introduction: The exhibition of students’ semestral works usually lasts a mere week, and then it disappears from the awareness of the public. As we do not wish to keep the results of our work to ourselves, we have decided to publish this intermittent magazine, which will sum up critically the semester that has just elapsed.
Is it possible to impress musical emotions on a typeface design? Should the graphic design of a musical album illustrate faithfully the atmosphere of the music? Do musicians have a taste in art? What is an image of a band? What does the recording market look like today and what place on it is taken up by typography? This was the sort of questions we posed ourselves together with our external lecturer, the academic painter Karel Haloun, who elaborated this theme in detail on three budgetary levels: a starting band – a well-known ensemble – a local superstar. It was pleasant to see that the students for the most part had chosen the first category and addressed specific musicians from among their acquaintances, who just needed to have designs made for their new recordings.
In many cases an original alphabet has become a suitable bearer of visual identity of a band. Some students, however, developed the theme of a purpose-made alphabet in quite a different direction: Jan Augusta on the basis of an analysis of an upper-case inscriptional alphabet from matchbox labels arrived to a design of corporate identity for a match-producing factory, while Roman Černohous was attracted to the seemingly cool atmosphere of the typography of electronic facilities. The metabolic rhythm of man and nature inspired Kateřina Šachová to implement a unique conceptual experiment. Paradoxically, all the purpose-made alphabets can be utilized subsequently for quite different types of work.  Evidence to this is above all Michal Smejkal’s perfect typeface "Bahno “. All the students’ typefaces have been professionally digitalized into OpenType format with a varying number of functions and constitute full-value typographic software.
Worthy of special attention are also those students who have quite specific talents, as is Martina Nováková, who makes beautiful books, the intellectual Jan Čumlivski with his cheeky linocuts commenting on the drama of a concentration camp for pop-stars, and Klára Kulhánková with her charming photographic diary documenting wayside crosses, as well as Magdalena Kalistová with her typeface for dogs' asylum.
The semestral works of some students responded to a specific order of the editor-in-chief of the Ekolist magazine. Some of these works, for example the posters of Jaroslav Svoboda, exceed the framework of the task in their increased urgency.
(I hope that the following editorial will be written by one of our students. )


František Štorm 14. 1. 2005