The typeface Pakatel takes inspiration from the Dutch music scene from the late 1970s to the 1990s, a time when connection to the club community often mattered more than readability. A distinctive feature of Pakatel is its embedded diacritics, which are engineered to facilitate both horizontal and vertical typesetting by integrating accents within the letterforms, thereby preserving the integrity of the overall layout. Some critics argue that the typeface lacks legibility...
We don't think so.
Luděk Kubík and Karel Haloun first created Pakatel for the album “Jasná páká Starej každej bejt neumí,” designing the basic character set in Illustrator at the /3.dílna/ studio. They used a geometric method, building each letter on a 7x7 square grid, which gave the typeface its straight lines and even stroke width, with pixel-like diagonals added where needed. Later, Jan Arndt digitized the alphabet for a lyric video and expanded Pakatel to include several widths, from ultra-condensed to ultra-expanded. He also softened the original design by adding both internal and external rounding.
www.karajan.cz/pakatel
