Peter Biľak

In 2019 he was awarded the Gold Prize in the European Design Awards for his font "Ping", a truly international typeface, supporting not only hundreds of Latin-based languages, but also Arabic, Armenian, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Korean, Hebrew and Japanese, unprecedented goal for a small independent type foundry.

In 2015, Peter Biľak, together with Andrej Krátky co-founded Fontstand, a desktop app that allows trying fonts for free or renting them per month, also referred to as the "iTunes for Fonts". Fontstand has been included in the New Europe 100, a list of Central and Eastern Europe innovations that recognises those who expertise in emerging technologies, unique skills and social outreach which have had a global impact. New Europe 100 is organised by Res Publica together with Google, the Visegrad Fund, and in cooperation with the Financial Times.

In 2014, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic awarded Biľak the Goodwill Envoy award for the successful spreading of the country Slovakia.

In 2013, after raising €30,000 in a crowdfunding campaign, Biľak founded Works That Work, a magazine of unexpected creativity, published twice a year by Typotheque, in print and digital edition. Works That Work is an international design magazine that looks studies the impact of design around the world, comparable as the National Geographic of design. The British national daily newspaper The Guardian named Works That Work as 'some of the best-looking new magazines', and Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University reported how 'the small magazine has found a way to get noticed globally by creating a beautiful digital edition as well as a creative way to distribute its print copies—gaining a lot of ever-coveted user engagement in the process.' . Works That Work distributes 43% of its print run via their Social Distribution, a reader-based system of distribution of physical copies of magazine bypassing traditional distribution channels.

For his contribution to the non-Latin typography, he was named in 2012 one of the 12 Game Changers by Metropolis.

Because of his interest in languages, he worked in 2007 with Indian designer Satya Rajpurohit on the Hindi version of Fedra Sans, and in 2009 started the Indian Type Foundry. Similar to Typotheque, ITF started out with a single typeface, but has larger plans to develop typefaces for all Indian writing scripts such as Devanagari, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, etc. It also has plans to organise lectures and workshops in India, and to publish typefaces made by local designers. Prajavani, a major South Indian newspaper, has engaged the firm to create a custom typeface, something virtually unheard of in Indian publishing. Since then, ITF has created fonts for multinationals such as Google, Apple, Sony, Samsung, Amazon, amongst others.

From 2004 he has been collaborating with the choreographer Lukáš Timulak on the concepts of dance performances. Together they were subject of an exhibition 'InLoop/EnTry' in Stroom, Centre for Art and Architecture. Biľak defines the concept of the dance pieces, getting involved very early on in the process. While it is clear what Timulak does as the choreographer, Biľak's role has been defined in the theatre credits sometimes as designer, stage designer, sometimes as dramaturge, sometimes described simply by the noun 'concept'.

In 2003, he designed a series of the standard post stamps for the Dutch Royal mail (TNT Post), today one of the Icons of the Post. The design of these standard postage stamps was inspired by the Dutch landscape, the starting point being the view of geometric fields from the air, the first view of the country offered to any visitor landing at Amsterdam airport. Besides the inspiration coming from the landscape, the stamps offer another reading. The design is purely typographical, as the width of each letter determines the width of the surrounding block. This depicts how old-style metal printing works, setting metal punches next to each other. In this respect the stamps can be seen as a modest homage to the traditions of Dutch typography. The stamps have been reprinted three times, totalling over 143,000,000 copies. The 2010 edition was slightly modified.

Between 2000 and 2007, Biľak was the co-founder (along with Stuart Bailey), co-editor, and designer of Dot Dot Dot, an art and design journal. Dot Dot Dot is a biannual, self- published, after-hours magazine, originally centred around graphic design, later broadening in scope to interdisciplinary journalism on subjects that affect the way people look at the world, think about and make design. It was not to be a magazine showing visual outcomes of the design process, but presenting the recurring themes of daily work. It was designed to change the way of thinking from 'what a design magazine should show' to 'what we are interested in as designers'. After three issues, the tagline 'graphic design/visual communication magazine', was scrapped, since Biľak thought there was no reason why some things like film, music, literature should not be in the magazine. The only connection it has with graphic design is that the co-founders studied design. The last issue of Dot Dot Dot magazine was published in summer 2010.

Biľak started his career with international design agency, Studio Dumbar in The Hague, where he worked between 1999 and 2001. After leaving Studio Dumbar, he started working independently.

In 1999, Biľak established the type foundry Typotheque with the idea of "digging out all the projects from the drawers and publishing them." Originally started with a single typeface, Typotheque has then published articles, book reviews and interviews with other designers, and quickly becoming a reference in the world of design and typography. In October 2009, Typotheque was the first type foundry to license its entire font collection as webfonts.

Biľak has been designing typefaces since the early 1990s. Notable able fonts are listed below:

Peter Biľak (Slovak pronunciation: [ˈpeter ˈbiʎak]; born 1973 in Czechoslovakia) is a Slovak graphic and typeface designer, based in The Hague, The Netherlands. He works in the field of editorial, graphic, and type design; teaches typeface design at the postgraduate course Type&Media at the KABK, Royal Academy of Art (The Hague). He started Typotheque in 1999, Dot Dot Dot in 2000 (with Stuart Bailey), Indian Type Foundry in 2009, Works That Work magazine in 2012, and Fontstand in 2015. He is a member of AGI, (Alliance Graphique Internationale.) and lectures on his work internationally. He is a writer for numerous design magazines and frequently contributes writing and design to books and publications that include Print, Emigre, Eye (magazine), Items, tipoGrafica, Idea (magazine), Abitare and, Page.