The FF Pitu typeface by Łukasz Dziedzic has been just released by FontShop International and is available in OpenType in three styles:
In his primary occupation as an editorial and magazine designer, Łukasz Dziedzic has been constantly in search for new typefaces. Most of his own fonts originate in situations where he felt that none of the faces currently available on the market worked “quite right” in the context of a project he was currently working on. Therefore, most of his typefaces have at some point been tested in real magazine layouts, and refined based on those findings. This was also the case with Pitu: an early version of the design was used by the Polish weekly “Europa” until the magazine assumed a different stylistic direction.
Pitu started off in 2002 as a set of swashy capitals accompanied by lowercase that sits somewhere between a Didone italic and a Copperplate script. Its most characteristic features are probably the pronounced stroke modulation and blade-shaped sharp stroke endings, which are slightly softened by generous calligraphic loops with “foxtail” terminals. While keeping a slanted angle of the face, Lukasz expanded the initial face into a three-weight family, changed the proportions of the lowercase, reworked the swash capitals and added a complete set of “simple” Didone capitals and small caps.
In 2004, Pitu was selected for the “Bookmark” exhibition that showcased Central European typeface designs. The exhibition took place in The Hague and was hosted by the Slovak Centre of Design.
The primary alphabets of Pitu consists of an ordinary uppercase and lowercase
small caps
swash capitals, lowercase alternates
The fonts also include several kinds or figures, various ligatures, superscripts, subscripts and many more characters. The FF Pitu Pro fonts cover all Latin-based European languages, including some niceties. For example, in addition to the regular „ł”,
Pitu contains a calligraphic „ł” variant, typical for Polish handwriting:
And even, by popular demand (i.e. I asked him), an „łł” ligature:
Full character sets can be viewed for FF Pitu Pro Light, FF Pitu Pro Regular and FF Pitu Pro Bold (the images are large).
FF Pitu is available through the FontShop network. In addition to the three FF Pitu Pro OpenType fonts, the design is available in a variety of other encodings and formats.
Łukasz Dziedzic was born 1967 in Warsaw. Rather than to finish high school, he worked as a sound technician and occasionally actor at a children's theatre group, spent a year working as a carpenter helper rebuilding 13th-century churches, he lent his voice and bass guitar skills to the band »Dunski Jazz«, and worked as a software developer at the Polish patent office.
During the first free Polish elections of 1989, he briefly worked as a newsboy for Gazeta Wyborcza, the newly-launched, first independent daily newspaper in the country. A year later, he joined the design department of Gazeta Wyborcza and spent seven years there, co-creating the layouts of the main newspaper and its weekly companion magazine, for which he drew his first typeface. He later worked for several other publishing houses in Warsaw (since 2003 at Axel Springer Polska), designing newspapers and magazines. In the same time, Łukasz drew over a dozen typeface families ranging from large Latin and Cyrillic text families to single display styles. Many of these fonts were originally created for a particular newspaper or magazine layout. Some of them went into regular use or were used occasionally (in Poland: Gazeta Wyborcza, Vita, Przyjaciółka, Fakt, Lub Czasopismo, Gość Niedzielny, TeleŚwiat, Komputer Świat, in Russia: OK!, in Germany: OK! and PAGE), others were never utilized.
In 2007, Łukasz created a three-style Latin and Cyrillic corporate family for empik, one of Poland's largest press and music retail store networks. In the same time, FontShop International released two of Łukasz Dziedzic's families (FF Clan and FF Good). His Typo Berlin 2008 appearance did not bring him a standing ovation, as he did not show any examples of his own work, so he will do better next time. In 2008, FontFont released FF Clan Italic and FF Pitu. His other unreleased designs can be seen at his website alfabety.pl.
The designer's name is spelled Łukasz, not Lukasz, but Typophile's support for non-Western characters in the Flash-driven headlines is broken.
For those who like tongue twisters and want to try pronouncing Łukasz Dziedzic's name: it would go like woo-cash jeh-jeets. Also, Pitu should be pronounced pee-too (rhymes with me-too), not pie-two or pie-t-you.
Łukasz has absolutely no clue what Pitu is useful for, so I suggest you give it a shot and let him know.
Regards,
Adam
