Reflex magazine

The Reflex typeface was designed by a graphic design team, namely Pavel Beneš, Pavel Lev and Aleš Najbrt, for Reflex, a weekly magazine focusing on social, political and cultural commentary and issues that first went to print in 1990, shortly after the Velvet Revolution. 

The headlines were handdrawn in ink, based on the letterforms of the logotype. These drawings were then made into reusable templates. The magazine’s graphic style can be seen as a contemporary answer to Britain’s The Face, art-directed by Neville Brody; in the Czech context, a magazine with such dominant and playful typography was a welcome novelty.

Even though the graphic attributes of the magazine slowly gravitated towards the mainstream over time, Najbrt’s striking logotype, which formed the identity of the magazine since its conception, remains to this 
day. After many years, Aleš Najbrt joined up with Marek Pistora, who art-directed Reflex from 2001 on, to digitize the Reflex typeface. It is now available to the public and spans five widths plus italics.