Jozef Vlček was a significant Czech graphic designer who was active in Slovakia. He came from Červený Kostelec and studied at the Art-Industrial School in Prague. In the twenties and thirties, he worked as a lithographer and retoucher of photogravure in the graphic design workshops of Jozef Doležal in Červený Kostelec and in a commercial printing company, Melantrich, in Prague. He created a whole range of promotional posters of outstanding technical quality for various firms. The Bratislava printing company Slovenská Grafia also noticed his work and offered him a job. Vlček accepted it and in 1937, he moved to Bratislava. At Slovenská Grafia, he worked in a similar position, as a retoucher and supervised the quality of final prints. He mastered the technique of American retouching, which he especially used to create advertising brochures and postage stamps. In 1939, he made his first series of Slovak postage stamps with values of 5, 10, 20 and 40 haliers and a series of aviation stamps. At the beginning of 1942, the then Matica slovenská Secretary for Art, Jozef Cincík, hired him for the printing office, Neografia in Turčiansky Svätý Martin. Vlček worked there as the leader of the art studio and he was in charge of a team of various significant visual artists. He himself continued to participate in the formation of the technical aspects of advertisements and postage stamps. It was he who created the series of red and blue postage due stamps, stamps for the 80th anniversary of the memorandum assembly in Martin as well as the stamp that depicted the work A Young Man Wearing a Folk Costume (Mládenec v kroji) by Martin Benka and a number of other stamps. The most famous series of postage stamps were created together by Vlček and Cincík – a series of eight occasional stamps for the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Slovak Republic, titled Princes (Kniežatá), which was issued on March 14, 1944. Jozef Vlček also devoted his time to making illustrations, designing books and his own themes. As a supervisor of visual artists as well as young apprentices, he worked in Neografia until he retired.
                                                                                                                                                                                Gabriela Ondrišáková