Meet Panell, Displaay’s brutalist block typeface in seven widths

The Brand Identity: In 2021, a student from a film school in Prague asked Ilya Bazhanov to create titles for her documentary about the aftermath of a tornado that had torn through South Moravia. Bazhanov, a type designer and graphic designer born in Chelyabinsk and based in Prague for over a decade, immediately started drawing a custom typeface. Those first sketches existed only as a single narrow style of uppercase letters, shaped by his emotional response to the film and the events it captured.

Five years later, that impulsive reaction has grown into Panell – a 56-style block typeface released through Displaay that spans seven widths, four weights and three variable font axes. The path from film titles to commercial release took several detours. A year after the documentary project, a group of architect friends approached Bazhanov to design the visual identity for Alterace, a conference and exhibition in Prague exploring interdisciplinary collaboration between architecture and ceramics students.

He returned to those early tornado-inspired sketches but reworked them substantially, introducing dynamic rounding to the corners and adding an extra-wide style. The architectural context pushed the typeface toward something more modular and spatial. “You can see this influence most clearly in the Wide style,” Bazhanov explains. “The geometry of the letters becomes more block-like, almost reminiscent of bricks or structural elements.

The proportions feel more architectural, with a certain weight and spatial rhythm that echoes the logic of brutalist buildings.” That brutalist atmosphere runs through Panell’s DNA, though the connection is more felt than literal. The typeface’s promotional materials reference concrete panel housing blocks, and the name itself seems to point in that direction – but both Bazhanov and Displaay’s Martin Vácha, CEO & Type Designer, are quick to clarify that the association is more atmospheric than direct. “It does not always have to be something concrete,” Vácha notes.

“It emerged from a white paper as an impulsive reaction to feelings.” The name was chosen from several options (another contender was Regaal) for its match with the typeface’s overall character. Bazhanov puts it similarly: “Naming a typeface doesn’t always need to point to a specific object or concept. Sometimes it simply grows out of the atmosphere of the project.” What gives Panell its identity is the asymmetry built into the letterforms. The construction of the ‘o’ uses a sharper rounding on one diagonal and a different radius on the opposite, creating a subtle tension that propels the rhythm forward.

This uneven geometry is the engine of the typeface – it prevents the block forms from feeling static and gives the whole family a sense of momentum. Rounded corners appear only in specific places throughout the character set, and where those curves meet the surrounding straight geometry, the contrast generates energy. The family stretches across seven width families: Compressed, Condensed, Narrow, Standard, Wide, Extended and Expanded. Maintaining a coherent identity across such extremes presented one of the project’s biggest challenges.

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The introduction of a new typeface with a focus on emotional and contextual influences in brand strategy is significant for designers, offers a fresh perspective, and provides actionable insights for brand strategy professionals.