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Your name / Company name
Büro Boris Dworschak

A short description about you and or the company you work for?
I’m a graphic designer focusing on corporate design, book and magazine design, poster design and font design and work with clients who mostly have cultural and art backgrounds.

What is your direction in graphic design? How would you characterize your style?
Clear, conceptual, multidisciplinary and type oriented. The starting point of my design is always content; everything else is a result of the content.

Place of work
Pforzheim and Karlsruhe, Germany

Can you give us a short description about the font?
IkiruSerif ("Ikiru" is japanese and means "to live", "to exist") is a contemporary Slab-Serif font family with 10 weights including thin, light, regular, medium, bold and their italic versions. The five weights and their corresponding italics are especially designed from the thin version giving it an elegant, sharp and discreet look and the bold version a beefy yet concise look. The IkiruSerif font family includes a full character set and is suitable for composing texts of various lengths – very effective for a wide range of daily use.

Why did you design this font?
I think it combines different elements to something new and unique.

What is the ideal usage of your font?
In general, IkiruSerif can be used for texts, copies or headlines. The thin version is especially designed for usage in big point sizes, for instance in posters or banners, but it´s also possible to use it in small, of course.

Do you design your fonts by hand, or directly on the computer?
I create fonts directly with the Font Editor application.

Does developing a typeface start with the character (the individual letter) or are there intermediate stages in which a kind of rhythm develops?
I created the current font based on several versions that were attempts to develop a system that allowed for the development of what is now IkiruSerif. The individual previous versions were only partially functional. But the way the current font looks is based on both all of what I had tried in the past and specific parts of that work. If one considers the individual development phases as pieces of music and their progression as rhythm, one can see how a homogenous, harmonious product came about. I am generally very interested in systems that – in this case – are comprised of individual letters that each need to work. But to me, the most interesting thing is when the system suddenly doesn't work any more. That's when the creative process really begins. Because that's when one must rethink everything and, if need be, throw things out and restructure them.

Can you explain what makes you choose a typeface? Or which typefaces catch your eye as something special?
A typeface catches my eye usually when I see something special and unique.

Your future plans?
Make IkiruSans and IkiruMono versions.