Kostas Bartsokas

Kostas Bartsokas is a type designer, font engineer, and co-founder of Foundry5, an independent type design studio. He has worked as a senior type designer at URW Type Foundry and has consulted on Greek and designed Greek extensions for various type foundries.

He earned his Masters in Typeface Design at the University of Reading, with a distinction in 2016. His dissertation “Early Greek printing types” examines and compares the most distinct models of Greek typefaces cut in the late 15th and early 16th century, providing a context for evaluating the transition of the written script into metal typefaces,

He has designed various scripts (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Tamil), and he has released popular and commercially successful font families like Averta and Zona Pro from his personal label, as well as the open source fonts Commissioner and Oi for Google. For Foundry5 he designed Evert, Botanic Grotesque, Jali Greek, and he co-designed Peridot with Pria Ravichandran.

He has also released Canicule on Future Fonts and has worked on numerous custom typeface design projects for brands such as Shell, Dyson, Mercedes, Lahi Tapiola, Ravensbourne University, and others.

His work has received acclaimed awards and recognitions by the Type Directors Club (TDC), Granshan, EdAwards, EVGE, and Communication Arts, and he has served as a juror for both TDC and Granshan competitions.

He has spoken about the textural qualities of typefaces in his talk “Releasing the Tension: The Dance of Type Across Sizes” at ISType2024in Istanbul, Turkey.

He was born in Thessaloniki, Greece where he currently lives with his partner, typeface designer Pria Ravichandran, and their son.