The archive · Design & Visual · Product decision · 2024
Holos gives Ukraine's silenced avant-garde lettering a modern voice
A design student turns Pavlo Kovzhun's 1920s-30s lettering into a working font, so a suppressed heritage is written with, not just shown.
Korysta Alyona
What it had to solve
The self-set brief for a bachelor's diploma in graphic design was to take Ukrainian cultural heritage that had been suppressed and hidden for years and give it a voice through design.
How it works
In Ukraine, where a rich graphic heritage was suppressed and hidden for years, a graphic-design student made that suppression the subject of her bachelor's diploma. The result is Holos — 'voice' in Ukrainian — a modern typeface whose forms descend from the lettering of Pavlo Kovzhun, a Ukrainian graphic artist of the 1920s and 30s.
The project framed design as research: the task was to study the cultural heritage that had been kept from view and give it a voice. Holos answers by carrying Kovzhun's early twentieth-century lettering into a complete contemporary typeface, its sharp shapes holding an authentic Ukrainian character rather than an anonymous one.
A typeface is a rare form of heritage work because it is usable: every text set in Holos carries that reference forward. The font entered D&AD's awards archive under Type Design & Lettering and was selected for the D&AD Annual 2024; the archive records no sales or usage figures, so the entry stands on the idea itself.
Why it lands
- It turns commemoration into a working tool — a font is used, so a silenced tradition keeps being spoken instead of merely exhibited.
- The designer anchored the project in one named source, Pavlo Kovzhun, so the typeface is research with an author, not a generic national style.
- A diploma project set its own brief at the level of cultural memory, showing that student work can carry real weight.
What it did
A diploma project became a usable piece of cultural transmission, preserved in D&AD's awards archive under Type Design & Lettering and selected for the D&AD Annual 2024. The archive records no sales or usage figures.
What you can take
Heritage research need not stop at an essay or an exhibition: translated into a working tool such as a font, a silenced visual tradition gets a voice people can use every day.
Since then
Holos lives in D&AD's awards archive as a Type Design & Lettering case and was selected for the D&AD Annual 2024. The archive entry records no usage or sales figures, so the durable pattern is the design move: heritage that was deliberately hidden can be revived as a usable contemporary form rather than only documented.
Sources
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.
Your turn
You just read one. Describe the brief you are staring at, and see who has been given the same problem.
Free account · 3 free questions · no card