An interview with Botio Nikoltchev, type designer

We had the chance to ask a few questions to Botio Nikoltchev, a young talented font designer. You'll be interested in discovering his work and what he has to say about it.

Hi Botio, can you introduce yourself to our readers?

I am a typical Bulgarian guy born in Sofia. In the late 90s I choosed to live in Berlin, the best city ever (but don't visit it in winter). I love boxing, typography, yoga, music and partys. Actually, after writing this I realized that these few things are taking me a lot of time…

You recently published Ropa Sans Pro, what where your goals when designing it?

I didn't have any concrete goals designing the Ropa Sans family. I've been doing a lot of custom and corporate fonts in the recent years, and all of them have had very specific and precise requirements. That's why I decided to make the Ropa Sans with no constraint, just the way I like it.

Can you introduce your other fonts to us, and which one is your favorite?

My first release in 2010 was the PTL Manohara. It is a dynamic, humanistic typeface with Latin and Cyrilic range and smlall caps characters. At that time I also worked together with Ole Schäfer on the Cyrillic characters of PTL Manual, PTL Manual Mono and PTL Notes.

I published also a small fun-font on Google web fonts – its called Sofadi, it was a project I did during my study at the University of Applied Science Potsdam.

Together with Erik Spiekermann and Raph du Carrois I worked on the Meta Serif Cyrillic and Greek and also on the Meta Science, witch is a huge font family with a character set of about 2800 Glyphs. And the last year we finished also the Fira Sans for Mozilla Firefox. It is a very nice open source font family. My favorite one is my new one – its called Nomi and it is a wonderful typeface.

Who is your favorite type designer, and what is your current favorite typeface?

I appreciate the work of Jovica Veljović very much. Mr. Veljovic is a calligrapher and type designer on a high end level. There are a lot of good type designers and a lot of good calligraphers, but to have that in one person on that level is very rare. Just take a look on Veljovic Script or Ex Ponto, this are two fantastic typefaces. My favorite typeface… that's a very difficult question… There are many awesome typefaces and it depends on the usage, the particular case or the purpose wich one I would choose.

What tools do you work with for designing typefaces?

Mostly, I work with FontLab and Glyphs. At the moment I'm testing the preview version of the new FontLab. And I can allready say that its quite cool. The FontLab team is working on a lot of new features, but I can't talk about that in details.

What advice would you give to someone, an amateur or a graphic designer, who wants to design a font?

Just do it!