Industry: Design

Typeface System for Croatian and Serbian Scripts

One typeface, two scripts, one political reconciliation

Balkan Sans Stencil is a bi-script typeface system designed by Marija Juza and Nikola Djurek that pairs Latin and Cyrillic letterforms for the languages of the former Yugoslavia—Bosnian, Montenegrin, Croatian, and Serbian. Two primary style variants stack the two scripts vertically in opposite orders, with three sub-variants of Style A controlling how elements extend beyond the word's bounding box. OpenType Stylistic Sets extend transliteration support to Russian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian into English and German romanisation schemes.

Set in Balkan Sans Stencil

Insights

Style A places Latin above Cyrillic; Style B reverses the order—making script hierarchy a deliberate, switchable editorial choice.
Three sub-variants of Style A each treat differently the elements that extend beyond the word's bounding box.
Transliteration was originally scoped to Serbian and Croatian; expansion to Russian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian required reviewing multiple competing romanisation standards before encoding them as Stylistic Sets.
The project received TDC Typographic Excellence 2012, a Special Jury Award at the 23rd Biennial of Design Slovenia 2012, Typographica Favorite Typefaces of 2012, and Grand Prix from the Croatian Designers Society 2016.