Punch

Hi there, my name is Kristof.I am an independent type/graphic designer, based in Antwerp, Belgium. I am also the founder of the Punch type foundry.As a kid, I grew up with design: in between hundreds of magazines (my mother owns a renowned news stand / gift shop) and the presses of my father (he runs his own print shop), I had a first glimpse on the whole process.In my teens, I grew from a shy boy into a more open, inquisitive and opinionated person with an interest for different art forms. I was always interested in visual arts, and occasionally created some designs for some of my father’s clients, but it was only years later when I really started to study the rules and software more thoroughly. More specific, I got intruiged by the shapes of letters and handwriting. My personal handwriting always had many flourishes and, of course, I tried to put that into vector with an open source font editor, in which I failed miserably, since I had yet to learn all the wonderful secrets and features that a font can carry.Meanwhile, I got very used to handling the pen tool, and as I was creating, I automatically learned a lot of visual typographic peculiarities and how to improve them.I soon realised that type design was the perfect playground for my autodidact mindset, my ability of problem solving and the way I like to approach things with an abstract eye. So after I purchased my first professional font editor; Punch was about to be born.Punch, the name, was inspired by punch letters that were used by lettersetters in analogue printing. Whilst practically everything is digital now, I do like to look back at the times I made my own first prints using an old manual letterpress in my father’s work shop. Physically witnessing and experiencing the mindblowing digital evolution in such a short period of time, I’m sure has had a huge effect on who I am today, as a person, and my perspective on almost everything.The philosophy behind Punch is not very strict — I prefer creativity over trends, and I like to switch drastically from one concept to another. In the end, I firmly believe all fonts speak for themselves and that there is a design waiting for each and every one of them.Currently, design is not my main activity, so it’s not very easy to foretell the future of Punch. Nonetheless, it is an ongoing project, and there are many more fonts on the drawingtable, ready to be finished and published. If you like to be updated, I occassionally share my work process on Instagram @kvpdesign (most used) or @punch.type