Dacho – Indeks album art
Contributed by Hrvoje Živčić
on Feb 23rd, 2026. Artwork published in
.
Designed by the Slovenian design studio Ljudje, Indeks is Dacho’s debut album. The cover features a photo of the young rapper and mimics a student record book. Main title is set in Ergon, the stamp uses a typeface named Karlin, designed by Type Salon after a concept design by studio Ljudje, and the artist’s full name is written by hand. There are a few more typefaces making an appearance and extending the typographic palette: Helvetica, Notera and Cactus Jack.
3 Comments on “Dacho – Indeks album art”
Ergon reminds me of LetterPerfect’s Donatello and Ghiberti.
That’s a good observation!
In his design notes on Ergon, Christian Schwartz mentions and shows various influences from the typographic diversity of the city of Dubrovnik and beyond, including stone-chiseled letters, and how that led Hrvoje Živčić to “a chiseled typeface of high contrast that has triangular terminals reminiscent of serifs, but that is fundamentally a sans serif.”
However, no explicit reference is made to what Nicolete Gray called the “Florentine Sans Serif”. But you’re right: especially Ergon’s capitals with their tapering stems and wedge-shaped bars have a lot in common with typefaces that follow inscriptional letterforms from early 15th century Florence – like Donatello and Ghiberti. Shown below is Ergon (right) compared to Florentine Bold (Dickinson, by 1898).
The republic of Venice had a big influence on the entire Croatian coast and the region around Dubrovnik where most of my references came from. I suppose venetian and florentine styles were also often similar. However, I can say I didn’t know about the term Florentine Sans Serif while designing Ergon, or about Donatello and Ghiberti. After digesting a certain amount of references, I just started drawing from scratch and trying to get a certain feel, namely something with an incised look, but more digital and graphic in execution. I guess the more obvious depart from historic references can be seen in the lowercase and especially in the heaviest weights.