Peter Biľak – Designing for Purpose
From transforming type design to empowering digital accessibility, Biľak redefines design’s role in society through sustainability, inclusivity, and global impact.
Based in the Netherlands, Bil’ak is the founder of Typotheque, a trailblazing company specializing in type design, typography, and branding.
Among his many groundbreaking achievements, Peter co-founded Dot Dot Dot, a seminal art and culture magazine, and Works That Work, a publication that redefined design and introduced new operational models for independent periodicals. His passion for typography led him to co-found Fontstand, revolutionizing the way fonts are discovered and licensed, and TPTQ Arabic, dedicated to creating modern and authentic Arabic typefaces.
Peter’s journey with Dot Dot Dot raised questions about design’s purpose beyond commercial success, challenging the view held by IBM’s Thomas Watson that “good design is good business.” Instead, he argues, design should emphasise sustainability, longevity, and social relevance. To probe these issues further, he launched Works That Work, a magazine spotlighting “unexpected creativity” and eschewing traditional advertising in favour of radical transparency. Readers could choose their price, revealing exactly which production costs it covered. They also pioneered “social distribution”, empowering readers to distribute the magazine to remote and underserved areas worldwide. By looking beyond the latest trends, Works That Work examines design’s long-term impact on society, promoting a more ethical and holistic perspective on creative work.
Peter’s examples focus on innovative and functional design that often impacts behaviour and generates tangible outcomes. Peter talks about Bhutan’s unique use of postage stamps as a fundraising tool to develop national infrastructure like schools, hospitals, and postal networks. In the 1960s, after being denied international loans due to political pressures from neighbouring countries, Bhutan partnered with American entrepreneur Burt Todd to create collectible postage stamps, targeting global collectors. Bhutan experimented with unusual designs, including lenticular 3D stamps and even “talking” vinyl stamps that could play audio on record players. These stamps became sought-after collector’s items, significantly contributing to Bhutan’s GDP; by 1976, about 30% of Bhutan’s revenue came from stamp sales. This unconventional approach leveraged postage as both a cultural and economic asset, funding public services and preserving Bhutan’s independence in a challenging geopolitical setting
Peter argues that good design should benefit all stakeholders—not just creators or investors but also end users. This belief drives his typographic work, especially in addressing the digital exclusion faced by many languages. Of the world’s 7,000 languages, only a small fraction is fully supported by modern technology, leaving countless speakers without fonts, keyboard layouts, or operating system compatibility. For instance, despite its vast number of speakers, Bengali lacks comprehensive digital support, forcing users to adapt to dominant languages. Peter’s team is addressing this gap by researching regional typographic preferences and creating tailored fonts for underrepresented scripts, such as Devanagari, used in many Indian and Nepali languages. Peter explains how his team developed November, a typographic system tailored for the Indian subcontinent’s linguistic diversity. Unlike a one-size-fits-all font, November includes specialised versions for Nepali, Hindi, and Marathi, each adapted to regional letterform preferences. This inclusive approach ensures all scripts receive equal attention, supporting over 2 billion people and promoting accessibility for underrepresented languages.
The work for a Paris hospital, collaborating with Integral Designers was aimed to improve accessibility for patients with diverse visual impairments. Recognising that patients experience a wide range of vision limitations—from tunnel vision to central vision loss to blurriness—the team designed and tested typefaces tailored for each group. By examining letter widths, they found that narrow letters aided those with tunnel vision, while wider letters improved legibility for patients with blurry vision. After pilot testing with various font widths, Peter’s team ran a large-scale study to refine these proportions, focusing on readability and optimising reaction times. They used a specialised font called Zed, which consistently outperformed standard Helvetica. This research, documented in scientific journals and online, is now being implemented in the hospital, creating a signage system that considers letter width, colour, placement, and contrast to cater to the needs of all visitors, including those with disabilities.