We think of the Latin alphabet as fixed and unchanging. From history, however, we know that what we understand today as definitive and clearly codified has been examined and revised numerous times. Aside from the crowning monumental Roman capitals, this is why we know the somewhat uncouth Greek inscriptions, in old uncial manuscripts we find lush rounded shapes, and the strict, vertical (and unreadable) blackletters have been preserved from the high Middle Ages. But typographic modernism did not give up on creative experimentation. While German typographers at the beginning of the 20th century explored the possibilities and boundaries of geometrically-constructed types, Czech architects and designers sought to find a “national style,” a unique artistic language for the newly-formed state of Czechoslovakia.
While the Jaroslav type family respects efforts to find new expression in an old and seemingly exhausted Latin, it reflects everything that was to come in the last hundred years. For this reason, Jaroslav is primarily a reaction to the problem of the exaggerated unification of sans-serif letterforms. Its innovative approach to the lowercase and uppercase characters refreshes the clearly dried-up concept of the grotesque, and brings to it again the much-needed principles of freedom and creative playfulness.

The Jaroslav typeface is a tribute to the typography of Jaroslav Benda.