Péter Virágvölgyi (November 4,éterVirágvö 1948 – July 4, 1998) was a Hungarian typographer, calligrapher, graphic designer, associate professor at the Hungarian Academy of Craft & Design. He was the initiator of the italic handwriting curriculum for elementary schools in Hungary, author of the book A tipográfia mestersége számítógéppel (The Craft of Typography with a Computer) and the designer of the Zeebevel font.
Studies
He finished the High School of Fine & Applied Arts (Budapest, Hungary) in 1967. He graduated from the Department of Typo-Graphics of the Hungarian Academy of Craft & Design (Budapest, Hungary) in 1973 as a graphic designer, his master was György Haiman. He wrote his dissertation on shopfront signs, display type designs, calligraphic compositions, posters. The academy published his thesis Proposal for the Reform of Handwriting Education in Elementary Schools.
Career
From 1974 until his death, he lectured about graphic design and typography at the Hungarian Academy of Craft & Design, first as teaching assistant and then as an assistant professor from 1983. In 1987, he was appointed associate professor. He was the Hungarian representative of the official validation session of the new European Design Studies MA program in 1995, at the University of Brighton, UK. In the fall semester of 1997-98 he worked as a visiting professor at the Department of Graphic Design of the Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. From 1993 until his death, he was the Head of the Department of Visual Communication of the Hungarian Academy of Craft & Design.
In 1982 he became a member of the Friends of Calligraphy Society (San Francisco, USA). Slides of his work can be found in the calligraphy collection of the San Francisco Public Library. He had been a Hungarian representative of the ATypI group (Association Typographique Internationale) since 1983. In 1991, he was elected to ATypI's international board of directors at the Annual General Meeting in Parma (Italy), becoming chairman of the Research and Education Committee. In 1992 he organized ATypI's eighth international working seminar called the Technology & the Human Hand – The Visual Editing of Written Communication in Budapest.
From 1986 he was a member of the main jury of the Beautiful Hungarian Book Contest, from 1989 to 93 and in 1995 he was its chairman. In 1987 he designed the Hungarian National Gallery’s Kassák Centennial Exhibition in 1987.
In 1997, his design of the book Stefan Zweig: Buchmendel was recognized at the Beautiful Hungarian Book Contest in the category of bibliophilic and special publications. In 1999 he received (posthumously) the Memorial Plaque for Hungarian Higher Education.
Italic handwriting
Based on his italic handwriting proposal submitted as his thesis, he became the leader of a teaching experiment that run between 1975 and 1979 under the supervision of the National Pedagogical Institute (OPI) in Hungary (together with psychologist Dr. Róbert Ligeti and head teacher Katalin Kutiné Sahin-Tóth). Between 1985 and 1990, he relaunched teaching experiments in several schools again, on the basis of which italic handwriting was officially adopted by the Hungarian state in 1991 as an electable teaching curriculum.
