Summer 2011. End of first year at Bezalel. The social protest. Smartphones and Facebook in their infancy, the middle class taking to the streets. Tel Aviv converging on Rothschild Boulevard. Tents. Innocence. Hope. Creative signs. Talk of social justice, cost of living, affordable housing, Moshe Kahlon and the cellular revolution.

Ahh… it fills me with nostalgia for the problems of the past. But let’s forget our current troubles for a moment and talk about the Olfa family. To understand the Olfa family, we need to go back not to 2011 but to 1992 — where I am a 6-year-old boy going to work with my father.

My father was an architect, and he worked at Masaryk Square, on the corner of Netzach Israel and King George streets. I remember spending entire days there, reading every word in the sports newspaper, drawing on sheets with special rulers and compasses, and going with the secretaries to buy popsicles.

But the crown jewel was Aharon’s room — the model maker. A paradise of cardboard, balsa wood, adhesives, rulers, knives, sandpaper, grass wallpaper, miniature shrubs, and thin plexiglass from which windows and dreams are made. Aharon built the studio’s models, and I would sit down to work beside him with equal seriousness. That is how, at a very young age, I became acquainted with a Japanese knife — yellow, made by the Japanese company OLFA — which Aharon gave me as a gift. That knife served me well for many long years: later at Bezalel, during my graduate studies in the Netherlands, and to this day.

Fast forward. Twenty years ahead. The social protest ends, we return to Jerusalem. Second year. A group of students from the PPE program (Philosophy, Political Science and Economics) at the Hebrew University establishes “Beshutaf” — a cooperative food store in central Jerusalem, with ambitions to take on the corporations. Big dreams, small apartments. I met Itamar, one of the cooperative’s founders, because our partners were flatmates at the time. Let me try to reconstruct our conversation:

Itamar: “How can we create a logo for the cooperative without infringing anyone’s copyright?”

Me: “I think if you write or draw the cooperative’s name on paper, in your own handwriting, it won’t infringe any copyright”.

Itamar: “Want to do it yourself?”

This was a period in my studies when I realized that the Japanese knife I received from Aharon the model maker was my comfort zone. I had done quite a few exercises with it — designed book covers in a typography course, illustrated wrapping paper in an illustration course — and whenever I needed quick, light solutions, it was there.

Within a few minutes I had cut out the letters of the word “Beshutaf”, the following day at Bezalel I scanned them, and the logo was born. Very quickly and naturally I joined the Beshutaf cooperative as its graphic designer. I found myself surrounded by good people, driven by motivation, ideology and willpower. The cooperative’s members found a space to open a store, spoke with suppliers, and before long we were all doing our shopping in a Jerusalem classroom allocated to us for afternoon hours.

Returning to the graphic angle — after the logo, we moved on to designing the store itself. Using that same Japanese knife I prepared signs for the entire store, and when things became too complex I transferred the letters into Illustrator. The Olfa font (then called “Beshutaf”) became the first typeface I ever designed.

Over the years, this font became for me a safe playground — a place to try new ideas, make mistakes and learn more about type design. Because of its technical, simple structure and its free letterforms that seem to proclaim sloppiness and restlessness as a style — it was always comfortable to return and abuse it as the ultimate guinea pig. Things like interpolation, ligatures, how to do diacritical marks, Color Fonts technology and more — I tried all of these for the first time on Olfa. Slowly it grew heavier, and without noticing, it became quite a substantial family, rich in weights, languages and many glyphs.

In the end, the Beshutaf cooperative wound down in 2019, after eight exciting years of activity — I’m not even sure exactly why or under what circumstances. But happily, several generations of students benefited from its fair and underground-style shopping. Who knows, perhaps some of those fabric shopping bags are still circulating in Jerusalem. Beyond the technical playground it gave me, Olfa also taught me that typefaces have a life of their own. Because even after all these years, it was simply there — in Dropbox, waiting for the right moment to step out into the world, complete with a Flintstones-style black weight and even an Arabic version. Ready to take the least serious projects very seriously indeed.