Nestor Pavlidès

The project

Marika is a serif typeface born from the encounter between lapidary carving and calligraphic chancery writing. It is fundamentally gestural and cursive, playing on the contrast between the flowing marks of a pen and the dry, cut outlines inherited from stone engraving, a character that could be described as semi-serif or upright italic, reinterpreting the historical Chancery hand.

The family balances calligraphic expressiveness with a calm, steady rhythm, with the ambition of working as a text face despite its strong personality. It exists in both Display and Book versions to widen its range of uses, and multiplies its identity further through multiscript support: alongside Latin, it extends into Greek and Cyrillic. Its name, Marika, comes from the affectionate nickname traditionally given to girls named Maria in Greece, Turkey, and Russia.

Concept

Marika started from the carving of a stone inscription, whose lowercase forms, normally difficult to engrave, were made easier by drawing on the chancery calligraphy model, straightened into a kind of upright italic. Pavlidès returned to calligraphy to explore this chancery hand, developing an upright version and looking for shapes that could carry over into typographic drawing, before starting his first digital drawings in Glyphs with multiscript ambitions in mind from the outset, given his specialization in Greek letterforms.

Three references anchored the research: Sully-Jonquières by José Mendoza, a true upright italic from which Pavlidès kept traditional glyph shapes such as the two-counter 'a'; Oxalis by Franck Jalleau, an important calligraphic reference whose display/text balance inspired him even while staying far from its humanist features; and Omonia by Yannis Karlopoulos, a well-known Greek typeface that already paired an upright italic with the Latin, offering a model for balancing the two scripts.

Process

Pavlidès works by moving quickly from calligraphic sketches to digital drawing in Glyphs, once the main features of a typeface are settled in his mind and eye. He has used the typeface to improve the typeface: Marika Display Bold was used for the title of a small photo-book he made in Athens, with Marika Book set as the running text inside, an early real-world test of the family's range of uses.