Oded Ezer

Typembria, watch video, 2009

He is already world known; the single contemporary israeli typographer (or typographic artists) to become a design pop star. Oded Ezer’s experiments are innovative and inspiring, twisting the boundaries and exploring the possibilities of meshing the field of Hebrew type (as well as Latin) with biology, technology, materiality and endless more alternatives.

Tybrid - Oded Ezer's typo hybrids, 2007

Maya Light font, corresponds to Futura

Gestalten recently published his monograph - I highly recommend it! Get it here.

Frankrhulia font (sketches), inspired by Frank Ruehl, 2005

It is impossible to summarize such a great man and body of work. To see more, you can follow him on his website, foundry, twitter, flickr and blog.

Typosperma, Ezer as the typographic scientist, 2006

Fontef

Cartonnage Typeface and Notebooks

Yanek Yontef, a graduate and former teacher at Bezalel academy of art and design, is an important figure in contemporary Hebrew typography. His fonts are seen everywhere across Israel; newspapers, signage, advertisement, branding, posters etc. Yontef's importance is due not only to the large variety of interesting contemporary typefaces he has designed (both Hebrew and Latin), but also in his teaching he pioneered the typography and lettering methodology at Bezalel(former students are, among others, Oded Ezer and Danny Meirav [Hatayas, Hagilda]).

Pauza and Pauza Latin

Fontef (Yontef's one man type foundry) has a well-designed website (both in Hebrew and English versions) that showcase his great designs. Notice his bilingual families such as Pauza - the latin font has some of the harsh geometries taken from hebrew while the hebrew font has some more roundness at the corners of the letter; both typefaces balance out each other and potentially allow to a good combination of English and Hebrew text.

Strauss

Hagilda - Independant Type Design Cooperative

The Smoker Serif

Hagilda (The Guild) is an Israeli type foundry (or as they like to define themselves- type design cooperative) of prominent designers Michal Sahar and Danny Meirav, both Bezalel graduates from the late 90’s and each runs his/her own independant design studio.

Palestina by Oded Ezer

Blender Condensed

Almost all of their font families are revivals of known Hebrew typefaces (such as Haim, Aharoni, Meriam) which have become default to us israeli Microsoft Word users (the equivalent to times new roman, if i may say so myself). Hagilda brings the joy back to older Hebrew typography and makes me, at least, pay more attention to the minutiae in such ancestors. Another aspect they express is vernacular or signage inspired typography, such as the poppy and fun Glass of Milk and Kartiv (Popsicle). Looking through the catalog really gives you a sense of the design culture, and therefore popular culture, that developed in the short history of Israel.

Kartiv

A Glass of Milk