translation into English: Vesna Janković

There are only several very important things we should learn at the faculty.

The one, which at the moment seems to me the most important one, is the skill of recognizing oneself in the world achievements, conscious facing with these compatible particles and one’s own contribution made with might and main, with lot of peace and patince without any pretensions and with serious, personal aspirations.

Tabula – because it was the only possible name: the model was an inscription on the table of the Trajan’s column in Rome and whenever a new font is initiated a number of empty windows open up for the letters and you really faces Tabula Rasa.

The capital of the Trajan’s column was made around A. D. 114 and represents seven centuries of human development and classic standard of proportions. Rome is saturated with heavy, musty beauty.

You feel that even after several projects of working out a typographic face at the faculty you still miss certain step preceding it, some serious model and complex limitations which give you unbelievable possibilities for building up. There in front of you is the collection of stone monuments of the Sremska Mitrovica Museum and its parts all around the hotel in that small town. (It is strange to keep tombstones in the corridors of a small provincial hotel despite the fact they are pride of the town. Nevertheless I am grateful to the hotel designers for this bizarre detail.) It would be careless just to avoid that; there you deal with the skill of recognizing yourself in the achievements of the world followed by the patient research on how you fit in all that. You work out the tone you want to gain with the new letters, what are your models, what you want to preserve and what to modify. After numerous freely written out papers on the model of capital, but keeping clear of its restraint and precision I made a typeface which is my classic capital, my classic I. (Some others will be my childlike I or womenlike I). The impression of the engraved letters is entirely different from the one of the printed black letters on the white paper, but I forget that instantly, I am not chasing details, I just need impression – classic I. That is why making of Cyrillic is not a problem because you don’t look at the monitor looking for solution but it is imposed to you.

Later I looked in a more detailed way other typefaces inspired by the capital from the Trajan’s column, first of all Trajan contained in the Adobe Originals package which was designed by Carol Twombly in 1989 who followed her model in a more rigid maner.

Aurea Titling is specific modification with »thorny« endings of the extended serifs designed by Image Club Graphics Fonts in 1992.

Professor Đorđe Živkovic made Cyrillic inspired by the same capital and called it Trajan; it results from the deep thinking and essential understending of the Roman capital forms and encompases expanded group of characters including Russian forms.

Typographic family Tabula has three weights (light, regular, bold) in Latin and Cyrillic variant. As the very capital it is display, titling font. With its softened contours and general elegant and transparent impression it is suitable for combinations in classic designers’ solutions, pure modern layout and diversified contemporary designers’ or purely typographic experiments.

Tabula (PDF: 33,8 KB)

Tabula Cyrillic (PDF: 38,4 KB)

We are grateful to
PRO HELVETIA
Swiss Cultural Programme
Serbia and Montenegro
for the support which enabled this translation.