New Website Design

Since May 1, 2025, the Web of the Czech Handel Society has a new layout, based on a design by Libor Hofman.

Many of us have felt the need to modernize and update the graphic identity of the Czech Handel Society for quite some time. Libor Hofman, a full member of ČHäS and a graphic designer, who is behind the design of most of the Society's printed materials in recent years, took the initiative. At the end of February 2025, he came up with a very clever design for the new logo of the Society. A few days later, on March 6, he e-mailed a group of committee members and the webmaster a proposal to modernize the graphic design of the website. A sketch of the new website design was attached to the e-mail. The proposal fell on fertile ground.

The original website was created in the late 1990s. Its design, using a drawing by academic painter Lenka Kerelová from 1991 and the Logo of the Society, created by Slavomil Nol in 1990, emerged, based on the required functionalities, through the cooperation of Pavel Polka, the then chairman of the Society, and Jan Kučera, the webmaster, somewhat spontaneously.
Technically the Website was based on a tabular design and the use of standard computer fonts, which was the only approach that worked reliably across the world of different systems and browsers at the time of its creation.
27 years later, the site was still functional and users could use it without any problems (unless they had some professional Adobe products installed on their computer, which had “mixed up” the fonts and their coding(s)), but the world was already a different place. The webmaster was aware of both the limitations of the design and, in particular, the obsolescence of the technical design, and over the time, he quietly, “under the hood”, gradually modernized the site. Libor Hofman’s proposal was exactly the impetus that was needed to accelerate the changes.

As for the technical means, the new site is based on HTML5 and CSS2, with some CSS3 extensions. The basic font is Source Serif 4 createdy by Frank Grießhammer and offered free of charge as a web font by Google. Both the front page and the header are in vector format SVG and use the web version of the font Tyfa Text Pro by František Štorm (the original font was created by Josef Týfa between 1959 and 1960). The front page and the header also include a vectorized Handel profile from the original logo by Slavomil Nol.
The basic solution – menu on the left, main panel on the right, a separate panel for third and fourth level pages – has proven to be successful, so it has been retained (with some minor improvements).

Given the complex structure of the site and its size (around 1400 different files), it is more than likely that some “omitted” pages are still displayed in the old way. Please be patient – ​​we are working on fixing it.

The end of one stage of website modernization means the beginning of another stage. The next step we plan for the future will be the application of the principles of responsive design.