Interview with
Alexandra Korolkova

l­ex­an­dra speaks im­pa­tiently, like someone tak­ing a mo­ment out of her busy sched­ule to rep­rim­and a neg­li­gent stu­dent. She talks about her typefaces and her plans for the near fu­ture with a sense of hu­mour. The scope of her act­iv­it­ies begs a com­par­is­on to a one-wo­man band. A graph­ic and type de­sign­er with a num­ber of ori­gin­al type fam­il­ies to her name, in­clud­ing Leksa, Leksa Sans, Circe, PT Serif и PT Sans (the lat­ter two de­signed with Olga Umpel­eva un­der the dir­ec­tion of Vladi­mir Efimov); a gradu­ate of the Mo­scow State Uni­versity of Print­ing (2006), a mem­ber of the school’s Type Work­shop led by Al­ex­an­der Tar­beev; a re­search­er, con­sult­ant and pro­fess­or (al­though she had to let go of most of her teach­ing com­mit­ments after the birth of her daugh­ter); a win­ner of in­ter­na­tion­al type design com­pet­i­tions (in­clud­ing TypeArt, Mod­ern Cyril­lic, Gran­shan and the ED Awards); Korolkova pub­lished a book in­tro­du­cing Rus­si­an read­ers to the ba­sics of ty­po­graphy, Живая типографика (Liv­ing Ty­po­graphy) in 2007; she has led the design de­part­ment of  Para­type, Rus­sia’s largest and best-re­puted font foundry, since 2009; she is fre­quently in­vited to speak at ma­jor in­ter­na­tion­al con­fer­en­ces on type and ty­po­graphy (ATypI, TYPO Ber­lin, TypeCon etc). 

 

The Prix Charles Peignot was awar­ded to a de­sign­er from Rus­sia for the first time in its his­tory. What does that mean to you?

It’s a silly old dream of mine that un­ex­pec­tedly came true. I knew about the Peignot Prize: I was at the ATypI con­fer­en­ce in Brighton in 2007 when it was giv­en to Schwartz (Chris­ti­an Schwartz, Amer­ic­an de­sign­er and co-founder of the Com­mer­cial­type stu­dio, re­ceived the prize in 2007—Ed.) and was greatly im­pressed by both the prize it­self and the spe­ci­men book­let with the win­ner’s typefaces. I de­cided I wanted to be­come one of these people. From time to time, I would ev­al­u­ate over­all res­ults of my work: “Is there a chance?” Each time, of course, I con­cluded I had no chance. I de­signed too few typefaces, my Lat­in faces had not won any in­ter­na­tion­al com­pet­i­tions and be­sides, there were people much cool­er out there. Later I got busier and vari­ous life’s chal­lenges dis­trac­ted me from these idle dreams. Sud­denly–bang!–I got a mes­sage from Max­im Zhukov con­grat­u­lat­ing me. For the first five minutes I thought it was a prank, be­cause the of­fi­cial mes­sage ended up in the folder set aside for my ATypI cor­res­pond­en­ce, which I rarely check.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What does re­ceiv­ing the Prize mean to me? I still think that based on the usu­al cri­ter­ia for the qual­ity and quant­ity of typeface out­put, as well as their im­pact on glob­al ty­po­graphy, I fall far short of the level of the last three win­ners. But the jury was pretty clear about the fact their de­cision was primar­ily based on re­cog­ni­tion of my ef­forts to pro­mote change and im­prove the ty­po­graph­ic en­vir­on­ment around me in every pos­sible way, and to a less­er de­gree on the mer­its of spe­cif­ic designs. Be­sides, one of the ob­vi­ous  trends in type design glob­ally right now is in fa­vour of mul­ti­lin­gual fam­il­ies and the non-Lat­ins, and I just hap­pen to fit in­to that nicely. To me this Prix Charles Peignot is a sign that the in­ter­na­tion­al type com­mu­nity is in­ter­es­ted in non-Lat­in type de­sign­ers, that they’ve star­ted to take the Cyril­lic al­pha­bet and the people who spe­cial­ize in it ser­i­ously, that we have come of age and they are will­ing to listen to us.

I feel a re­spons­ib­il­ity to pro­duce both new typefaces (now be­ing even more de­mand­ing to the res­ults) and the­ory. I will have to do a lot of writ­ing, per­haps primar­ily in Eng­lish.

What is the pro­cess of design­ing the Cyril­lic char­ac­ter set for mul­ti­lin­gual type fam­il­ies like today for the de­sign­ers less ex­per­i­en­ced with this script? Do they have a good grasp of its his­tory and how many liber­ties do they take in in­ter­pret­ing its forms? What sources are they in­formed by?

Our West­ern col­leagues have a hard time find­ing sources on design of the Cyril­lic. Ul­ti­mately, they can only read a re­l­at­ively small num­ber of art­icles on the sub­ject by Max­im Zhukov—and that’s ex­cel­lent that these art­icles ex­ist, but that’s still not enough. I would say far from it! To hell with it, I’m go­ing in­to brand­ing! They can browse il­lus­tra­tions in Rus­si­an-lan­guage books (mainly So­viet, which are few and far between, or Yuri Gor­don’s Книга про буквы (Book of Let­ters) and scour the in­ter­net in search of dis­par­ate sources, re­ly­ing on auto­mat­ic trans­lat­ors, but there’s still no single au­thor­it­at­ive re­source on the sub­ject. His­tor­ic­al ex­amples are easi­er to come by, but the situ­ation with up-to-date sources is poor. It is ex­tremely dif­fi­cult for a per­son who doesn’t read Rus­si­an to study Cyril­lic type design in­de­pend­ently. Most re­sort to ana­lys­ing ex­ist­ing Cyril­lic typefaces, of­ten un­able to judge their qual­ity. I even heard the opin­ion voiced that “these Rus­si­ans hide everything from us on pur­pose.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So if a West­ern de­sign­er takes a re­spons­ible at­ti­tude to the Cyril­lic al­pha­bet, then, as a rule, they feel pretty in­sec­ure and ask someone else how they can do a bet­ter job. Al­though, un­for­tu­nately, it of­ten hap­pens that the de­sign­er has enough con­fid­en­ce and few doubts, but in­suf­fi­cient know­ledge in the field of Cyril­lic. We can all see the res­ult of this.

As a res­ult of this short­age of in­form­a­tion, the most re­spons­ible of the for­eign type de­sign­ers who need to tackle Cyril­lics will con­sult an ex­pert. Un­jus­ti­fied self-con­fid­en­ce gets the bet­ter of many oth­ers. Un­for­tu­nate con­se­quences of this brag­gado­cio are in plain sight.

Do you have a meth­od­o­logy for con­sult­ing for­eign font de­sign­ers? What do you stress? Which of the liv­ing de­sign­ers dis­play the best mas­tery of the Cyril­lics?

I don’t do enough con­sult­ing to talk about a spe­cif­ic meth­od­o­logy. My ul­ti­mate ob­ject­ive is to end up with a us­able Cyril­lic that re­tains the spir­it of the ori­gin­al Lat­in reas­on­ably well, while my ba­sic goal is not to end up with a mon­ster. I first look at the Lat­in set to un­der­stand what sort of ef­fect the de­sign­er was after, wheth­er there are any dom­in­ant emo­tion­al and styl­ist­ic cues, or if the typeface is neut­ral in char­ac­ter. I then think about how to con­vey a sim­il­ar feel­ing in Cyril­lic. I share links to sim­il­ar typefaces or spe­ci­mens of let­ter­ing with the de­sign­er for ref­er­en­ce and, nat­ur­ally, make com­ments on the design of spe­cif­ic char­ac­ters. I note the de­sign­er’s re­ac­tion: how ready are they to make changes, how sens­it­ive are they to the dif­fer­en­ce between forms. At this point it be­comes clear wheth­er I should go all the way or settle for tech­nic­al com­ments: “nar­row­er here, wider here, shift this ele­ment to the left” for each char­ac­ter, and the like. The more sens­it­ive the de­sign­er is to the ty­po­graph­ic sub­tleties, the more in­formed are their design choices, and the less minute guid­ance of this sort they need. For ex­ample, I took a long time de­lib­er­at­ing which shape of K and Ж to re­com­mend to Ver­onika Buri­an for Ad­elle (us­ing the Lat­in form of the K in this case was not an op­tion), but as I was think­ing, she came up with a good solu­tion and the prob­lem re­solved it­self. I ima­gine, in a short while Ver­on­ica will do just fine on her own, as she’s keenly in­ter­es­ted in Cyril­lics and is look­ing to gain a deep­er un­der­stand­ing of the dif­fer­ent scripts she works with. A de­sign­er who is ser­i­ously fo­cused on mul­ti­lin­gual ty­po­graphy is in a whole dif­fer­ent league for me, com­pared to someone who designs the the non-Lat­in char­ac­ters just to com­plete the set.

 

 

 

As for the type design heavy­weights, Mat­thew Carter designs the best Cyril­lics hands down, al­though he ac­know­ledges that he con­stantly con­sults Max­im Zhukov. Carter Cyril­lics are un­equi­voc­ally good. Geor­gia, to take one ex­ample, could serve as a mod­el for any Rus­si­an-speak­ing type de­sign­er. I don’t know how im­port­ant mul­ti­lin­gual type design is for Carter, per­haps the qual­ity of his non-Lat­in char­ac­ters is just a sign of his su­per­lat­ive pro­fes­sion­al­ism. In any case, he is a kind of per­son you look up to and is im­pos­sible not to ad­mire.

You’ve taught at various schoolsYou’ve taught at vari­ous schools, in­clud­ing the Mo­scow State Uni­versity of Print­ing Arts and the Brit­ish School of Design.What are some com­mon mis­takes of type design stu­dents?

Every type design stu­dent has made at least one big mis­take: they de­cided to go in­to type design, in full know­ledge of the fact that out of a class of ten or fif­teen people in Mo­scow each year who choose this con­cen­tra­tion, about half a per­son will end up do­ing it for a liv­ing. Jokes aside, the de­cision is not ex­actly a mis­take, but the situ­ation is un­for­tu­nate. Let’s say, someone makes their first typeface for a class pro­ject, de­pend­ing on where they stud­ied, they may even com­plete the design and re­lease it, or may not. If they went to the Brit­ish School, most likely it even­tu­ally re­leased. If they went to the Uni­versity of Print­ing, they prob­ably would keep it to them­selves. They did it, more or less got it in­to shape and now have one proud sol­it­ary typeface. At this point they real­ise, “To hell with it, I’m go­ing in­to brand­ing!” The ba­sic course starts off with pen let­ter­ing­What’s the point of put­ting all this time and ef­fort in­to type design? I can’t blame them, but it seems to me it would be wiser to con­cen­trate in something only once you’re sure that it is what you want to do and plan to con­tin­ue do­ing in the fu­ture. I don’t know if the gen­er­al ex­pos­ure to the sub­ject is worth the in­vest­ment of years of pro­fes­sion­al train­ing.

How did you get in­to type design?

At my first type class, right at the be­gin­ning of my second year, the av­er­age age of the group was eight­een. We were all so “green”, had had been out of high school for only a year and barely began to real­ise that we wer­en’t on track to to be­come fine artists, but something else. Enter the cha­ris­mat­ic Al­ex­an­der Tar­beev (type de­sign­er, teach­er, founder of the Type Work­shop at the Mo­scow State Uni­versity of Print­ing, au­thor of many ori­gin­al typefaces and Cyril­lic ver­sions of Lat­in typefaces that have been awar­ded with Rus­si­an and in­ter­na­tion­al prizes. —Ed.). And right off the bat: “Who knows what boustrophedon is?” Ivan Vas­in who has three gen­er­a­tions of de­sign­ers in his fam­ily knew the an­swer right away, and I was sit­ting there with my “straight-A stu­dent” su­peri­or­ity com­plex, in­tim­id­ated, “Hmm, this pro­fess­or is def­in­itely not go­ing to pay any at­ten­tion to me…”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the first year of the found­a­tion course (in the second year at the Uni­versity of Print­ing Arts, four hours a week, with pro­fess­or di­vid­ing his at­ten­tion among thirty stu­dents), I de­cided to design my own typeface. Of course, I had to choose the most dif­fi­cult thing out there to cov­er as much ground as pos­sible in one shot, a Vene­tian old­style. This pro­ject evolved in­to Leksa.

There was a two-year ba­sic course at the uni­versity, then who­ever wanted went on to the Type Work­shop. The ba­sic course starts off with his­tor­ic­al cal­li­graphy for the first six months, mainly with a broad nib. As far as I know, poin­ted pen cal­li­graphy has also been in­tro­duced re­cently, but the bulk of the pro­gram is still mostly his­tor­ic­al scripts from Ro­man square cap­it­als and Rus­tica to hu­man­ist minus­cule and it­al­ic done with a broad-nib pen. The second semester was ded­ic­ated to the his­tory of ty­po­graphy, in­clud­ing type-based let­ter­ing. Dia­grams were drawn by hand on a sheet of A3 pa­per com­par­ing shapes of each char­ac­ter from vari­ous his­tor­ic­al peri­ods with dis­tin­guish­ing fea­tures of each style ex­plained in the cap­tions. The third was lettering, which was presented to us as logos, and was the most disastrous semester for all students. In the fourth, we had to make our own typeface, usually a display one.

What was your de­gree pro­ject?

It con­sis­ted of two parts: design­ing a typeface and writ­ing the Liv­ing Ty­po­graphy book. It may sound like a bit much for a school pro­ject, but this was not en­tirely my fault. The fac­ulty used our class as guinea pigs and in­tro­duced this so-called “spe­cial­isa­tion” for the first time right when I was there. About a year and a half be­fore the gradu­ation we were told, “Sit down and come up with a de­gree pro­ject”. I thought about what I could do for a year and a half without re­gret­ting it later and chose a book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you ever re­vise typefaces that have already been re­leased, such as Leksa?

I do, but only if someone finds a mis­take and alerts me of it. Oth­er­wise, tinker­ing with re­leased fonts is a can of worms: one thing leads to an­oth­er and there is no end in sight… Re­cently someone wrote to me about a prob­lem with the colon in one of my fonts. It wasn’t ex­actly wrong, but I’d made the left side bear­ing slightly wider hav­ing text set­ting in mind and not con­sid­er­ing prop­erly how it would ap­pear else­where. This per­son poin­ted out the way “18:00” looked in this font and I real­ized I botched up.

How do you be­gin the pro­cess of design­ing a typeface?

This may be un­usu­al, but I hardly pre­pare any sketches. At most, I do a very rough draw­ing. After four years of sketch­ing Leksa I dis­covered  the more care­fully I tried to draw, the worse the res­ult. Here is my work­flow now: I come up with the concept for a typeface, de­cide on its char­ac­ter, then I start com­ing up with shapes dir­ec­tly in Font­lab. Once the ba­sic set of char­ac­ters is drawn, I make the first prin­tout, look for mis­takes, cor­rect them, print again, and so on.

 

Have you con­sidered go­ing to school abroad?

I got in­to Read­ing (pres­ti­gi­ous uni­versity in Eng­land, the Uni­versity of Read­ing, MA Typeface Design pro­gramme chaired by Gerry Le­oni­das. – Ed.), but I could not find enough money to pay for the course (laughs).

By the way, in our in­ter­view with Gerry Le­oni­das, we asked why they did not have any stu­dents from Rus­sia, aside from Sophia Safaeva (Read­ing,2007). He thought the un­fair sys­tem that did not al­low for for­eign stu­dent schol­ar­ships for was to blame.

At the time, around the end of 2008, I could not af­ford to pay the tu­ition my­self: high­er edu­ca­tion in the UK is very ex­pens­ive for non-res­id­ents. I tried to get a grant from the Brit­ish Coun­cil. I filed out all of the pa­per­work and took the en­trance ex­ams. I passed and got some let­ters from Read­ing, but was not giv­en the grant.

Why were you in­ter­es­ted in the Uni­versity of Read­ing pro­gramme and not the pop­u­lar Type & Me­dia course at the Roy­al Academy of Art in The Hag­ue?

I wanted to go to Read­ing from the get-go. It was only later that I found out that you had to spend the second half of the year writ­ing writ­ing a dis­ser­ta­tion. It seemed to me that KABK had a more en­ter­tain­ing course. But for me edu­ca­tion was not so much about fun; I didn’t need to go any­where to have fun. Per­son­ally, I think it’s more im­port­ant for a type de­sign­er to be able to pro­duce a good text typeface than to be able to carve let­ters in stone or to write code. Per­haps I’m old-fash­ioned.

Vladi­mir Krichevsky al­ways says there is over abund­ance of typefaces and a lack of qual­ity ty­po­graphy in our world today. What are your thoughts on this? Is it type de­sign­er’s busi­ness to try to also be a ty­po­graph­er and set the bar of us­ing type prop­erly in the graph­ic design in­dustry?

I think it de­pends on the po­s­i­tion of the de­sign­er. There is plenty of his­tor­ic­al pre­ced­ents of people that de­signed the type, the book, and the rest of it single-handedly.

The golden age?

De­pends on how you look at it. I wouldn’t want to be in Bodoni’s shoes and work only on type design in the same style my en­tire life. Even as times changed, in the pan­to­graph era, people could design their types quietly without wor­ry­ing about the world bey­ond their room. Vladi­mir Efimov, to take an­oth­er ex­ample, was per­fectly con­tent be­ing just a type de­sign­er and did not feel an urge to set any sort of a bar for graph­ic de­sign­ers. Would it be a good idea to get in­volved in ty­po­graphy and lay­out as well? I can’t an­swer this ques­tion ob­ject­ively. Per­son­ally, I do. One simple reas­on is that I was trained to do it, and it would be strange to ig­nore these skills and for­get all about my five years at the Uni­versity of Print­ing Arts and about the es­teemed Al­ex­an­der Konoplev who taught me book design.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Would you agree with a state­ment that an un­jus­ti­fi­ably high num­ber of typefaces is pro­duced today? Many de­sign­ers just nev­er seem to stop.

Only a frac­tion of these de­sign­ers (half, at most) re­lease everything they design. Oth­ers keep most of their work to them­selves. Many of those that con­stantly re­lease fonts, un­for­tu­nately, have no mar­ket to speak of. This hap­pens all the time. A per­son designs a typeface just be­cause they feel like it; they sell a couple of li­censes, give it away to friends, and that’s about it. At the same token, truly es­sen­tial re­leases are few and far between.

Could you define es­sen­tial?

Per­haps it’s an over­state­ment; what I mean is types that can be used ef­fect­ively to solve a real-life prob­lem. This would be a well-made typeface with dis­tinct­ive fea­tures that make it the right one to spe­ci­fy in the right place. Oc­ca­sion­ally, a design prob­lem comes up which has no suit­able ty­po­graph­ic solu­tion at hand. At times, there’s only one ap­pro­pri­ate Cyril­lic face in ex­ist­en­ce which has been around for years and over­used. What is the great ma­jor­ity of Rus­si­an books set in? I can only name a hand­ful of types: Charter, Swift, Times, Peters­burg. It’s not be­cause we have a lot of good text typefaces but ty­po­graph­ers re­fuse to use them. It’s be­cause there is a scarcity of well-made text faces. They are simply not there, and neither is qual­ity ty­po­graphy. Ty­po­graphy does ex­ist, of course, but it has to op­er­ate with a very lim­ited vocab­u­lary. Two things are needed to have truly rich ty­po­graphy: tal­en­ted and well-trained ty­po­graph­ers, as well as a full styl­ist­ic range of qual­ity text types. I don’t mean to im­ply that every font on the mar­ket is bad, but the ma­jor­ity is. Any­one can eas­ily down­load thou­sands of bad pir­ated fonts from the web. The quick­er this ty­po­graph­ic noise dis­ap­pears, the soon­er the qual­ity of our ty­po­graphy at large will im­prove.

Will it go away on its own?

It’s gradu­ally giv­ing way – I’m look­ing out­side (our in­ter­view with Al­ex­an­dra took place in the centre of Mo­scow, at a cafe on Bolshaya Dmitro­vka Street—Ed.) and I see de­cent sig­nage. It’s clear that the situ­ation will not im­prove by it­self, but the num­ber of people who are com­ing in­to the pro­fes­sion with at least some train­ing is gradu­ally in­creas­ing, while the num­ber of people who just happened to be at the com­puter be­cause someone asked them to “put to­geth­er” some busi­ness cards or a sign is get­ting smal­ler. Now that that they are avail­able, the Lebedev guidelines (in the sum­mer of 2013, the Art. Lebedev Stu­dio presen­ted its design code for the city of Mo­scow, de­signed to reg­u­late the place­ment of out­door signs in the city and im­prove the ap­pear­ance of its his­tor­ic centre—Ed.) should make a dif­fer­en­ce. If they are ad­op­ted, our ty­po­graph­ic en­vir­on­ment will get at least a little bit bet­ter.

 

 

 

 

Many of your text faces can be used a wide range of pro­jects thanks to their ex­ten­ded char­ac­ter sets: old style fig­ures, small caps, op­tic­al sizes and oth­er ty­po­graph­ic en­hance­ments. Do you have a sense of how of­ten the users take ad­vant­age of them?

Ac­tu­ally, I don’t sup­ply all of these niceties in every case. I base the scope of each pro­ject on what I would find use­ful if I was the user. A while back (in an on­line dis­cus­sion on ru-ty­po­graphy.live­journ­al.com for­um), there was a de­bate on use­ful­ness  of small caps and old style fig­ures in it­al­ics. I could an­swer this ques­tion from my own ex­per­i­en­ce: the foot­notes in a book I de­signed were set in it­al­ics, while old style fig­ures were used in the main text. As far as I know, these fig­ures were ad­ded to the it­al­ic font later, but there wer­en’t any at that time. So I had to re­place all num­bers   in the it­al­ic foot­notes with up­right old style fig­ures, be­cause I didn’t want to use lin­ing fig­ures. It some­times simply gets an­noy­ing: small caps would fit the pro­ject, but they are not avail­able. Mean­while, it’s not that hard tech­nic­ally for the type de­sign­er to add them: with the help of mac­ros and ac­tions a min­im­um of hand work is needed.

Which de­sign­ers in­spire you?

My first love in type design was Wil­li­am Mor­ris. Not so much even his type design, as his ap­proach. Nev­er mind Golden Type! I love his ap­proach. He de­signed types, prin­ted his own books with them, cre­ated wall­pa­pers and tex­tiles, de­signed fur­niture, built a house… He’s done it all. Now that’s a de­sign­er! Then there are the de­sign­ers that you fol­low and envy.  Jean François Porchez, Jes­sica His­che, Max­imili­ano Sproviero, their sense of ty­po­graph­ic form is in­cred­ibly well-de­ve­loped.

Your book Liv­ing Ty­po­graphy was ad­dressed to young de­sign­ers and stu­dents. Have you con­sidered writ­ing a book for fel­low pro­fes­sion­als?

I’ve been think­ing about writ­ing a second book for a while, and ac­tu­ally wrote a chapter and a half about two or three years ago. It now seems that it will con­sist of two volumes: the first volume about type would be ad­dressed to the Rus­si­an de­sign­ers. It would cov­er the bases: the his­tory of cal­li­graphy, his­tor­ic­al over­view of type design, design the­ory: the pen, neg­at­ive shapes and so on. The second volume would be about the par­tic­u­lars of design­ing the Cyril­lic al­pha­bet; this would be ad­dressed not only to the Rus­si­an speak­ers, but also to oth­ers. I would talk about what kind of a beast it is, how its char­ac­ters are con­struc­ted, how to feel about vari­ous ar­che­types in Cyril­lic type design… Now, all I need to do is to sit down and to write it.