Ad­dress de­livered at the ac­cept­ance ce­re­mony of the pro­fess­or­ship in Ty­po­graph­ic Design, sponsored by the Dr. P.A.Tiele-sticht­ing, at Leiden Uni­versity on March 16, 2007

Aaron Burns (1922–1991), co-founder and pres­id­ent of ITC, was a ty­po­graph­er and ty­po­graphy en­thu­si­ast who made a massive im­pact on the de­vel­op­ment of ty­po­graphy and type design in post-So­viet Rus­sia. Today, few people are aware of this side of his work, so we in­vite the read­er to take a closer look. A short es­say by Max­im Zhukov on meet­ing the mas­ter, or­gan­iz­ing ex­hib­i­tions to­geth­er and part­ner­ing on ITC Cyril­lics.

“If one wanted to ex­per­i­ment freely with Cyril­lic forms and rhythms, one would have to ques­tion com­monly ac­cep­ted prac­tices and dare to think dif­fer­ently” — Ir­ina Smirnova and Max Ilinov are map­ping the in­ter­twin­ing roots of type design and cal­li­graphy and dis­cuss­ing the un­ob­vi­ous.

The his­tory has seen ex­amples of in­ven­tions of writ­ing for en­tire eth­nic groups, however rare script has un­der­gone as many trans­form­a­tions and re­forms as the Cyril­lic al­pha­bet.

There names that are in­cluded in the his­tory of art al­most auto­mat­ic­ally. They be­long. Rod­chen­ko and Stepan­ova are artists of this kind. In­deed, there would now – thanks to the ef­forts of their heirs and in­ter­es­ted schol­ars – hardly seem to be an un­ex­plored corner of their ex­ist­en­ce after the out­pour­ing of their let­ters and schol­arly art­icles and mem­oirs about them that began to be pub­lished in the late 1980s with the re­new­al of in­terest in the Rus­si­an av­ant-garde. Yet this con­ver­sa­tion with Aleksandr Lavren­tiev, schol­ar and pro­fess­or at the Strogan­ov Academy, of­fers a new angle on many ques­tions: Rod­chen­ko’s life be­fore the era of Con­struct­iv­ism, his role at VKhUTEM­AS, the Con­struct­iv­ist let­ter­ing al­most ob­scured by the paint­ings, his ac­claimed ad­vert­ising pro­jects un­der­taken in the 1920s.

‘A man of let­ters’ — used to call in­di­vidu­als in the Renais­sance times who were en­gaged in crit­ic­al think­ing, read­ing, re­search, and hu­man self-re­flec­tion about know­ledge, life and so­ci­ety. That defin­i­tion per­fectly suits Peter Bil­ak: he writes, lec­tures, pub­lishes, and more of that it re­flects a lit­er­al one di­men­sion of the term — he makes let­ters.

I loved cal­li­graphy but thought that if these people are in charge, it will die. I star­ted to real­ize that I had to open up to oth­er ideas and then the pro­cess star­ted. I was 30 years old by that time — pretty late, I thought. Any­way, at least it happened.

People are not per­fect, why should typefaces be?

Due to the pop­ular­ity of Sum­ner Stone’s typefaces, re­leased at the dawn of the di­git­al age, his name has al­most be­come a com­mon noun, but the world-renowned de­sign­er and founder of the Adobe Type De­part­ment is about much more than his early suc­cesses. Es­pe­cially for Type Journ­al, Sum­ner Stone talked to Misha Be­let­sky about type tech­niques, life, work, teach­ing and his plans.

We just like to print — one can find the state­ment on the spreads of the journ­al PA­PER, which Erik Spieker­mann pub­lishes with a small team of type-en­thu­si­asts at the let­ter­press work­shop p98a. At 70 years of age, hav­ing stepped down as chair­man at Eden­spieker­mann and switched between Font­Shop to p98a—after the ac­quis­i­tion by Mono­type in 2014—he doesn’t seem to be re­tired (al­though he men­tions the word re­peatedly).

Back in 2016, NORM Stu­dio gave a lec­ture at the Serebro Nabora con­fer­en­ce in Mo­scow. It was a case-study present­a­tion with the main fo­cus on type design. Look­ing closely at the works, one could find one­self in a world some­where between their Swiss pre­de­cessors’ ex­per­i­en­ce: such as Ad­ri­an Fru­ti­ger’s sys­tem­at­ic at­ti­tude to type design and Max Bill’s math­em­at­ic­al way of visu­al think­ing.

Pro­fess­or of ty­po­graphy, au­thor and edu­cat­or Gerd Fleischmann talks about the school Bauhaus phe­no­men­on, its time, mas­ters and ty­po­graph­ic­al pe­cu­li­ar­it­ies of that peri­od. “When I be­came aware of Bauhaus back in 1955, Bauhaus prom­ised free­dom. For me, it means mostly free­dom.”

This is the first in a series of columns on let­ters from the Cyril­lic al­pha­bet. What can we say about a let­ter when we look at it? Only that its form im­plies an in­fin­ite num­ber of vari­ants. But what hap­pens when we com­pare a let­ter with sim­il­ar char­ac­ters in a type sys­tem? The let­ter­form be­gins to make sense. Type de­sign­er Gay­an­eh Bag­dasary­an shares her opin­ion on shap­ing one of the trick­i­est let­ters in our al­pha­bet. We should add that every pro­fes­sion­al has gone through much suf­fer­ing over many years of prac­tice to come to these con­clu­sions, which means that they are sub­ject­ive and can be the sub­ject of de­bate.

In March 2013, Unit Edi­tions pub­lished a small book that shed light on the life and work of Dutch­man Jur­ri­aan Schro­fer (1926–1990), a ver­sat­ile de­sign­er little known out­side his own coun­try. His designs for pho­to­books and cor­por­ate iden­tit­ies were in­nov­at­ive, and he helped to or­gan­ize the design com­mu­nity and elab­or­ate state policy re­gard­ing the cre­at­ive in­dus­tries. At the peak of his ca­reer in the 70s, his bizarre ex­per­i­ment­al ap­proach to the con­struc­tion of typefaces and com­plex rhythmic com­pos­i­tions based on them set him apart.

Max­im Zhukov shares his views on the role of the clas­sic­al cap­it­al­is mo­nu­men­tal­is, as ex­em­pli­fied by the in­scrip­tion at the base of the Tra­jan’s column in Rome (113 CE), in the his­tory of So­viet print, graph­ic and type design, and ar­chi­tec­ture. Typefaces ori­gin­ally de­signed for set­ting lan­guages us­ing Lat­in al­pha­bet of­ten get ad­ap­ted for Cyril­lic and oth­er scripts. What makes the task of their “cyril­liz­a­tion” easi­er is the pres­en­ce of many let­ters in both al­pha­bets that share sim­il­ar forms, even if those glyphs re­late to dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters. Zhukov also elu­cid­ates the pro­cess of de­vel­op­ing a Cyril­lic ver­sion of Adobe Tra­jan Pro 3 and Adobe Tra­jan Sans he was in­vited to as­sist in.

Typer­a­dio is the ra­dio chan­nel on type and design. Since 2004 the archive of the in­ter­net ra­dio stream keeps grow­ing and counts at the mo­ment nearly three hun­dred re­cords of in­ter­views with design pro­fes­sion­als. This time Typer­a­dio (Liza En­e­beis and Don­ald Beek­man) an­swers to ques­tions from Ilya Ruder­man at the type con­fer­en­ce Serebro Nabora, Septem­ber 2015, Mo­scow.

Since 1982, the As­so­ci­ation Ty­po­graph­ique In­ter­na­tionale (ATypI) has awar­ded the Prix Charles Peignot, named after the or­gan­isa­tion’s first pres­id­ent, to a de­sign­er un­der the age of 35 “for an out­stand­ing con­tri­bu­tion to type design”. In 2013, Al­ex­an­dra Korolkova won the pres­ti­gi­ous award.

I am neither a sci­ent­ist nor a sema­si­olo­gist nor a philo­lo­gist—my field is book design; I am also en­gaged as a type de­sign­er. Ques­tions arise in my work which are not dir­ectly re­lated to my pro­fes­sion. It may, there­fore, be self-evid­ent that my at­tempts to ex­press an opin­ion about some of these prob­lems may lead to cer­tain mis­takes since I am not suf­fi­ciently pro­fi­cient in all of the com­plex­it­ies these prob­lems in­volve. In spite of this, I should like to deal with one of these prob­lems in a very gen­er­al way—simply as an idea—in the hope that it will be taken up, cor­rec­ted, and re­fined by the ap­pro­pri­ate spe­cial­ists.

I con­sider my­self to be a prac­ti­cing type de­sign­er who is less fo­cused on the his­tor­ic­al basis of his work and more in­ter­es­ted in try­ing to cre­ate something rel­ev­ant and new I take up pro­jects on the con­di­tion that there is a pos­sib­il­ity to come up with something unique that could con­trib­ute to a cer­tain part of type her­it­age or world cul­ture in gen­er­al. Al­though it prob­ably sounds too pre­sumtuous…

I’ve al­ways been very curi­ous, and I think curi­os­ity is a very fun­da­ment­al Dutch qual­ity. When you make a design, the first ques­tion you ask when you’ve made it is: What else can I get out of this? Is there any­thing more? Is there any­thing bey­ond what I have done so far? So that was an­oth­er thing that I’ve learned in the 60s as a stu­dent: nev­er be sat­is­fied with what you can do, but al­ways try to get a bit more out of your­self and to ex­per­i­ment. I think this is what I have in com­mon with many of my Dutch col­leagues.

Our Top-10 Cyril­lic Typefaces of 2013 pub­lished last year sparked a huge in­terest and un­til now this pub­lic­a­tion is one of the most read. The past year showed that the num­ber of great Cyril­lic typefaces is grow­ing con­stantly. More than 350 type pro­jects with Cyril­lic went in for the Mod­ern Cyril­lic 2014 com­pet­i­tion. But only a tiny part of this im­press­ive num­ber was re­leased on the mar­ket. Most of the pro­jects, in­clud­ing those cre­ated by bril­li­ant mas­ters, un­for­tu­nately re­main bey­ond de­sign­ers’ reach.

I was go­ing to a Ukrain­i­an type event, and I was sud­denly struck by the thought that here, in Rus­sia, there's noth­ing sim­il­ar, while there are a num­ber of such events in Ukraine. I found this so un­fair and even hurt­ful that I thought, “I have to fix this—right now, today”.

A suc­cess­ful text typeface to me is the one in which both the char­ac­ter set and the fam­ily struc­ture are well or­gan­ized. That’s what we star­ted our pro­ject in the Neth­er­lands with. Even us­ing just a few let­ters, you can de­cide on which ex­act styles are ne­ces­sary. After all, even a small de­tail af­fects everything else. You have to start with a broad over­view: what’s go­ing to be part of the fam­ily, and how the styles are go­ing to work with each oth­er.

Typefaces do not ex­ist in a va­cu­um: they take form and mean­ing be­cause they are re­sponses to many oth­er typefaces that ex­ist already, and to chan­ging con­di­tions of use. Good re­search skills, and a suf­fi­cient un­der­stand­ing of ty­po­graph­ic his­tory and prac­tice, are es­sen­tial.

In So­viet times, with the “type as­sets” put on spe­cial re­gister by the KGB, the de­vel­op­ment of ty­po­graphy had been cut short. Like sex, ty­po­graphy had no place in USSR. At the same time, with the spread of hand-let­ter­ing the book de­sign­ers de­ve­loped a unique, ex­quis­ite “feel­ing of com­mand” of type, and draw­ing it be­came an in­tim­ate in­stru­ment of self-as­ser­tion. 

An­nu­al roundups are com­mon in many fields, in­clud­ing ty­po­graphy. They al­low us to ob­serve trends, re­view what has been ac­com­plished, and com­pare it to the ex­pect­a­tions. To this end, the re­views ought to be con­duc­ted with reg­u­lar­ity. This has not been the case with Cyril­lic font design roundups so far. Res­ults of a few oc­ca­sion­al type design com­pet­i­tions have served as the closest sub­sti­tute in Rus­sia, fall­ing short of cre­at­ing the big pic­ture one could only see on a yearly basis. Our first an­nu­al list be­low seeks to rem­edy the situ­ation.

The typefaces of Hun­gari­an geni­us Miklós Kis (1650–1702) are the most strik­ing ex­ample of Dutch old-style An­ti­qua. In this second part of the es­say, Vladi­mir Ye­fimov gives a de­tailed ac­count of how was cre­ated Cyril­lic script for the Bit­s­ream's Kis—a con­tem­por­ary ver­sion of Miklós Kis's typeface. One of the most beau­ti­ful Lat­in typefaces of the great Rus­si­an ruler's era, in the au­thor’s opin­ion, gives the an­swer to a very reas­on­able ques­tion—Could a Pet­rine typeface take a dif­fer­ent form?

Civil Type and Kis Cyril­lic is Vladi­mir Ye­fimov’s es­say on the his­tory of Civil Script and the cre­ation of mod­ern Cyril­lic type based on his­tor­ic­al forms. Today, 10 years after its re­lease, the art­icle is not only still rel­ev­ant, but more cap­able than ever of rous­ing both pro­fes­sion­als and those read­ers who are in­ter­ested in the his­tory of Civil Type.