Łukasz Dziedzic was born 1967 in Warsaw. Rather than to finish high school, he worked as a sound technician and occasional actor at a children’s theatre group, spent a year working as a carpenter helper rebuilding 13th-century churches, he lent his voice and bass guitar skills to the band “Duński Jazz”, and worked as a software developer at the Polish patent office.
During the first free Polish elections of 1989, he briefly worked as a newsboy for Gazeta Wyborcza, the newly-launched, first independent daily newspaper in the country. A year later, he joined the design department of Gazeta Wyborcza and spent seven years there, co-creating the layouts of the main newspaper and its weekly companion magazine, for which he drew his first typeface. He later worked for several other publishing houses in Warsaw (since 2003 at Axel Springer Polska), designing newspapers and magazines, and in 2007, he founded his own studio tyPoland.
Since 2003, Łukasz has drawn over a dozen typeface families ranging from large Latin and Cyrillic text families to single display styles. Since 2007, FontFont has published several of his retail font families: FF Clan (which became one of FontFont’s best sellers), FF Good (the largest FontFont family as of 2013), FF More, FF Mach and FF Pitu. Łukasz created a three-style Latin and Cyrillic corporate family for empik, one of Poland’s largest press and music retail store networks.
In 2010, Dziedzic designed Lato, a sanserif family with five weights and the accompanying italics (“Lato” means “Summer” in Polish). Lato was published under the open-source Open Font License, and in 2014, it has been vastly expanded, with nine weights and over 3000 glyphs per font (extended Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, IPA phonetics and many more characters). Lato is one of the world’s most popular open-source font families.
