Interview with Masha Doreuli

de­sign­er’s cre­at­ive path is de­term­in­ed by the de­sire to find his or her own voice and style of work when cre­at­ing type. Ty­po­graph­ers are just as fa­mil­i­ar with the etern­al con­front­a­tion between form and con­tent as writers or paint­ers, but new dis­cov­er­ies are be­ing made in our sphere des­pite the com­plex­ity of cre­at­ive tasks. By Masha from Rus­sia—this play­ful phrase con­ceals a great amount of work done by Maria Doreuli over the past few years, in­clud­ing some le­git­im­ate suc­cess stor­ies: the vic­tory of typeface Wil­li­am at the Grand­champ (2011) and Let­ter.2 (2011) com­pet­i­tions, a mas­ter’s de­gree in Type & Me­dia from the Roy­al Academy of Art (KABK) in Hol­land (2013), and the re­cent nom­in­a­tion of font Chi­mera at TDC2 in New York (2014). These achieve­ments have made Maria’s name no­tice­able even when look­ing at the mod­ern type design land­scape from a dis­tance—es­pe­cially if it’s type­set in Chi­mera.

Masha, I would first like to ask you a ques­tion about the three spheres that are men­tioned on your web­site: graph­ic design, type design and writ­ing. Let’s start with writ­ing—it’s a pretty rare pro­fes­sion­al dir­ec­tion these days in Rus­sia. What top­ics are you in­ter­es­ted in?

Everything’s more or less clear with font and design—it’s my work and I’m genu­inely fas­cin­ated by it. Be­fore, I wasn’t really at­trac­ted to, say, es­says at school. I didn’t par­tic­u­larly like ana­lys­ing things and couldn’t un­der­stand why it’s ne­ces­sary. The de­sire to write ap­peared dur­ing my stud­ies in Hol­land on the Type & Me­dia course: I real­ised that it’s an im­port­ant as­pect of re­search.

At this point, we can talk a little bit about the blog you re­cently launched with Krista Rado­eva. By the way, what is Cyril­lic­sly?

“Cyril­lic­sly” is one of our Type & Me­dia in­side jokes. In­stead of “Ser­i­ously?!”, We used to say “Cyril­lic­sly?!”, and also sub­sti­tu­ted oth­er words with type buzzwords: ex­cited—x-heighted, I agree—I a greek. At first, we used #cyril­lic­sly on Twit­ter. It was just funny, and we’ve got used to it and de­cided that it’s not a bad name for a blog either. Cyril­lic­sly is a place where we share our thoughts. We’re not plan­ning on de­vel­op­ing it in­to an aca­dem­ic re­source teach­ing people how to draw Cyril­lic. We still only have one art­icle though, so at the mo­ment it’s more talk than ac­tions.

For a long time in Rus­sia there’s been a va­cu­um in which there’s little in­form­a­tion about the pro­fes­sion. For­eign col­leagues don’t know much about us.

I feel the need to write in Eng­lish, not in Rus­si­an, es­pe­cially on so­cial me­dia like Face­book and Twit­ter. For me, it’s not only an op­por­tun­ity to main­tain con­tact with col­leagues, but also just a way to pay trib­ute to for­eign friends. Take the Dutch, for ex­ample: they of­ten write in Eng­lish (though they have their own nat­ive lan­guage too), thereby broad­en­ing their pro­fes­sion­al ho­ri­zons and en­ga­ging in in­ter­na­tion­al dis­cus­sion.

The themes we are go­ing to dis­cuss in the blog are in-between dif­fer­ent Cyril­lic al­pha­bets, but that isn’t the only fo­cus. We rather wanted to high­light the vari­ety of pos­sib­il­it­ies and show how dif­fer­ent Cyril­lic can be. I’m out­raged by the way Rus­si­an col­leagues try to os­si­fy Cyril­lic, ef­fect­ively stop­ping its fur­ther de­vel­op­ment. I’m also pretty scep­tic­al about many things, but I think that you def­in­itely have to try something new. After all, you can only draw con­clu­sions about the feas­ib­il­ity of an ex­per­i­ment once you’ve car­ried it out.

Last year at the con­fer­en­ces Serebro Nabora in Mo­scow and ATypI in Am­s­ter­dam you and Krista raised the ques­tion of the pe­cu­li­ar­it­ies of Cyril­lics—Rus­si­an and Bul­gari­an—it was in a cer­tain sense a pro­voc­at­ive top­ic…

After the con­fer­en­ces and after we pub­lished some of our ma­ter­i­al in the blog, Krista and I star­ted to get a angry emails along the lines of “What are you writ­ing about?”, “What do you even know about this?” and “You’re all wrong!” In fact, it was all fo­cused on de­tails. We had to men­tion key but of­ten con­tro­ver­si­al his­tor­ic­al events when speak­ing about dif­fer­ent Cyril­lic al­pha­bets, but it was more of an in­tro­duc­tion for those who don’t know. The main theme was how our de­sign­ers and for­eign de­sign­ers com­pre­hend dif­fer­ent Cyril­lics. So the next post will be about the dif­fer­ent themes that we dis­cussed at the AtypI with West­ern de­sign­ers, and the res­ults of dis­cus­sions at the Serebro Nabora con­fer­en­ce. In a word, we’ll post it, then we’ll talk.

 

 

 

Let’s go back to type as a primary oc­cu­pa­tion. For you, it star­ted with Al­ex­an­der Tar­beev’s work­shop. Five years have already passed since your gradu­ation. What’s changed in the work­shop over this time?

I don’t think it’s changed much. There’s al­ways some nat­ur­al de­vel­op­ment, of course. When you study, you’re guided by work that’s been done by stu­dents be­fore you; you look at the people who were there, and set a stand­ard for your­self. The more strong works there are, the harder you try to reach the same level and do even more.

Did your gradu­ation pro­ject Wil­li­am—a his­tor­ic­al re­viv­al of the Caslon typeface—turn out to be that sort of high-level stand­ard for you?

I stud­ied to­geth­er with Artem Utkin and al­ways wondered how he man­aged to get so much done. It seemed that while I was work­ing on one style, he could fin­ish everything: a load of styles and an enorm­ous char­ac­ter set. In many ways I com­pared my­self to him and real­ised that you really have to find the time and work.

Wil­li­am came a little later. One day, when our group was con­sid­er­ing gradu­ation pro­ject top­ics and sketch­ing ideas, Al­ex­an­der brought in sev­er­al typeface cata­logues, “I found these on the in­ter­net, have a look”. That was the time when I got in­spired by the idea of cre­at­ing a su­per­fam­ily: sans and serif. By that time I’ve already did some draw­ings, but noth­ing came out of it—it was really bad! Then he brought me something and said, “You could do a Cyril­lic ver­sion of one of these typefaces. Maria, you should go and make a Cyril­lic Caslon!” I de­cided to give it a try, see­ing as I didn’t have a re­mark­able top­ic: I di­git­ised a few let­ters from one of the smal­lest point sizes from the cata­logue. There was quite a mea­gre amount of ma­ter­i­al for his­tor­ic­al re­con­struc­tion: I en­larged these not very high-qual­ity im­ages and star­ted to work, mak­ing my way through the huge pixels.

As a mat­ter of fact, I stud­ied the let­ters one by one dur­ing the pro­cess: Lat­in first, then I pro­ceeded to Cyril­lic. I re­mem­ber, I couldn’t get the let­ter б (Cyril­lic “Be”) right for a long time. It was my first ex­per­i­en­ce of design­ing type, so I did everything from the very start, and some­times I had to do things over and over again. It was a long pro­cess; I star­ted three years be­fore gradu­ation. Later Al­ex­an­der would be say­ing, “I should have done it my­self!” I think he found those cata­logues around March. By May, I already had some ba­sic char­ac­ters in the text style. Then in the au­tumn, dur­ing the ATypI Con­fer­en­ce in St. Peters­burg, Artem and I got to go to a two-day Akira Kobay­ashi work­shop and worked on our pro­jects there.

Which of Akira Kobay­ashi’s com­ments do you re­mem­ber? How did he give you feed­back?

We all came with what we had and just con­tin­ued work­ing in front of him. He went from one table to an­oth­er, had a thor­ough look and gave ad­vice. Now I can’t re­mem­ber ex­actly what Akira told me, but I was filled with a deep re­spect for him. Sur­pris­ingly, later he re­cog­nised me when he came to our KABK course with a lec­ture. We met once, and he re­cog­nised me after quite few years and re­membered my name—I was sur­prised!

Tak­ing in­to ac­count the fact that Wil­li­am Caslon I cre­ated his type in the 18th cen­tury, did you think of mak­ing, for ex­ample, a styl­ist­ic set with the form of Cyril­lic char­ac­ters cor­res­pond­ing to that era?

Wil­li­am isn’t a purely his­tor­ic­al re­viv­al, but rather a mod­ern in­ter­pret­a­tion. I think that there has to be a strong reas­on for al­tern­at­ive char­ac­ters. For ex­ample, in the case of the shape of Д and Л—rect­an­gu­lar or tri­an­gu­lar—the de­sign­er has to de­cide which form, in his opin­ion, fits to the idea and char­ac­ter of the typeface the most. I don’t think it’s a place where there can be al­tern­at­ives. These are some of the key let­ters, so a de­cision re­gard­ing them should be made. When sev­er­al con­struc­tions are in­cluded in a typeface, this makes me feel that the de­sign­er wasn’t able to make a de­cision. With Wil­li­am, I didn’t want to make ref­er­en­ces to the past. I wanted to make the Cyril­lic con­tem­por­ary.

 

 

 

 

 

What was Wil­li­am’s fate after your gradu­ation? Did you have plans to re­lease it at a type foundry?

I star­ted the pro­ject in 2007, so it’s been haunt­ing me for nearly sev­en years now. After gradu­ation, a pub­lish­ing house (we later fell out) bought it for the first time and prin­ted a series of books. I al­ways wanted to com­plete Wil­li­am, but I already had a job at the RIA Nov­osti news agency, so didn’t have any time. Then I was ap­proached by a cli­ent from Kiev who wanted to li­cense all the styles of Wil­li­am for the Zhensky Zhurn­al magazine (Wo­men’s Magazine). I thought, “Well, now I’ll have to rush and fin­ish all the styles just for him. I’ll bet­ter tell him a high price so he says no”. I told him the price, but he didn’t say no… And I had to fin­ish everything with­in three months! The text style was already more or less done and the main part of the head­line char­ac­ter set ex­is­ted, but the it­al­ics were just star­ted and in­cluded only few let­ters.

It was very in­tense—I worked a full work­ing day, then a “full work­ing night”, with no week­ends. I re­mem­ber the last day when I had to send off these files, I was fall­ing asleep on my feet and afraid of fall­ing over in the metro on my way to work. I didn’t have any en­ergy at all. But in the end I got the type fam­ily ready with everything that was ori­gin­ally planned. Some of the styles are in ex­actly the same con­di­tion now.

That’s not to say that I’m happy with how it all worked out. Only later I real­ised: you can nev­er be fully happy with everything. Nev­er­the­less, it was a cer­tain stage, I fin­ished the typeface in a way that I was able to sub­mit it to the Let­ter.2 com­pet­i­tion. It proved to be im­port­ant that I still had three months left to pre­pare well for the com­pet­i­tion.

We talked about Artem Utkin set­ting the bar high, which was an in­cent­ive. Con­tinu­ing the theme of your stud­ies, what was the group like on the Type & Me­dia course? Which ref­er­en­ce points did you have there?

As for t]m, things are com­pletely dif­fer­ent: the group it­self was im­port­ant there, not just one per­son. Be­cause every­one comes from dif­fer­ent back­grounds, dif­fer­ent coun­tries and is really dif­fer­ent, so they in­flu­en­ce each oth­er. From the start, we set out to so­cial­ise: cel­eb­rated birth­days, New Year, East­er, made cakes. Study­ing wasn’t the only im­port­ant thing for us, the fact that we were to­geth­er was too—we still do a lot of trav­el­ling to dif­fer­ent coun­tries and are de­lighted when we man­age to meet up.

I un­der­stand that the se­lec­tion of a har­mo­ni­ous group is one of the im­port­ant con­cepts of the Type & Me­dia course and its su­per­vi­sor Jan Willem Stas—the key to a suc­cess­ful learn­ing pro­cess.

It really is. Jan Willem nev­er ex­plained ex­actly how it’s done, but I guess that the teach­ers could pos­sibly see a per­son at the in­ter­view and say, “No, this one’s not for us”, even if they have an in­ter­est­ing port­fo­lio. Per­son­al­ity is im­port­ant. People are dif­fer­ent and the work dur­ing the course is very in­tens­ive, every­one is to­geth­er all the time, so it’s im­port­ant to avoid situ­ations that would get in the way of study­ing.

I didn’t get in the first time. It was prob­ably for the best—at the time that wasn’t my ul­ti­mate goal. But it was a blow to my self-es­teem when I was turned down, of course. I de­cided not to ap­ply any­more and con­tin­ue to pro­gress my­self. Later I changed my mind—after all, you shouldn’t miss such an op­por­tun­ity when you have the chance, while you don’t have kids and there’s noth­ing to stop you. So I de­cided to go all out: I went to the open day and took a more con­sidered ap­proach to my port­fo­lio—got rid of the ex­cess and filled it with some new work. I found out af­ter­wards that they wer­en’t sure wheth­er to take me again, but ac­cep­ted me after they saw me at the open day and the Ro­boton con­fer­en­ce in The Hag­ue.

 

 

When did get­ting in­to Type & Me­dia be­come your goal? Did you already real­ise that you had to move on after you fin­ished your stud­ies at Tar­beev’s work­shop?

Dur­ing my stud­ies, every­one did noth­ing but talk about Type & Me­dia, a lot of people studied there. But I thought it would be bet­ter to go to Read­ing—Sophia Safayeva was the only one to study there (that’s one of my char­ac­ter­ist­ics—to re­fuse something that is too pop­u­lar). I thought about Read­ing, but real­ised that it’s a lot of money and not a the best pos­sib­il­ity for me.

When I was work­ing on the grot­esque Ne­wOld for Dima Bar­banel, I got hung up on the fact that I can’t do any­thing new and ori­gin­al, that I work on the things that were already done be­fore and just in­clud­ing Cyril­lic there. This made me sad and I was fed up with work too: on the one hand, I learned a lot at RIA Nov­osti, but after about a year—18 months I had an idea in my mind that I want to quit. I had to fin­ish Wil­li­am, do something in­de­pend­ently, prac­tice cal­li­graphy… I wanted to pro­gress, but didn’t have enough time be­cause of my main job. A solu­tion that was com­fort­able for all sides sug­ges­ted it­self: I sort of didn’t quit, I just left to study.

 

 

 

How did work start on the course? What was the most dif­fi­cult thing at first?

The first semester lasts un­til the end of Janu­ary. Usu­ally, there are two classes a day—in the morn­ing and even­ing, and stu­dents get home­work to do for the next day. Classes go on un­til 5-6 pm, then there’s still a load of home­work—and you can’t put it off un­til the week­end, you have to do it every day. It’s really hard work. Un­til about Oc­to­ber, the pace is a bit calmer and it seems that everything is all right: trips, mu­seums, more the­ory, but in Novem­ber you real­ise that you’ve done noth­ing and now have to work twice as hard. This is how you learn to make de­cisions quickly, be­cause there is no time for hes­it­a­tion. You have to work con­stantly.

The main ad­vant­age of the first part of the course is that you don’t only mas­ter new tech­niques, but also ana­lyse what you’re bet­ter at and what you’re worse at—this is the first step to start­ing your gradu­ate pro­ject. You try a vari­ety of things, which gives you a found­a­tion and lets you un­der­stand what are you up to and what in­spires you. At the same time as study­ing, you try to find your own path.

 

 

 

 

How were the the­or­et­ic­al les­sons? Which top­ics did you dis­cuss and what was the most use­ful thing for you in the pro­gramme?

It’s quite flex­ible—there is a cer­tain pro­gramme that’s giv­en to every­one, but the top­ics of classes de­pend largely on the stu­dents’ ini­ti­at­ive. It’s im­port­ant for the teach­ers to see what we’re in­ter­es­ted in, what it’s worth fo­cus­ing on and what we already know. For them it’s im­port­ant that the stu­dents ask ques­tions in­stead of sit­ting in si­lence. If the class is quiet, you can con­clude that we already know everything and there might not even be a need to tell us all of this. I think this is also an ele­ment of edu­ca­tion that is re­quired for type de­sign­ers—to learn to look for prob­lems your­self. The most or­gan­ised classes were prob­ably Peter Biľak’s: the first part is a lec­ture, the second—dis­cus­sion in­volving ana­lys­is of our home­work. Everything was clear-cut with him, where­as oth­er teach­ers’ classes were less pre­dict­able. By the way, this kind of style and ap­proach to teach­ing re­minded me of Al­ex­an­der Tar­beev: everything was ex­actly the same—he didn’t have many pre-pre­pared lec­tures and your know­ledge de­pends largely on the ini­ti­at­ive you show.

Over­all, the course was set up as fol­lows: at first, with Erik van Blok­land we study poin­ted nib writ­ing, TypeCooker be­gins some­time in Novem­ber and we do a new sketch every week. Sim­ul­tan­eously, with Peter Ver­heul we study broad nib writ­ing and we cre­ate a typeface based on it. Dur­ing Paul van der Laan’s classes we work on a revival. Peter Biľak’s classes start later, from Novem­ber to Feb­ru­ary: he does lec­tures on many sub­jects in­clud­ing mul­ti­lin­gual type design and gives us as­sign­ments on Greek and type fam­ily plan­ning. He also taught us how to present our work. By Janu­ary, we’re already think­ing about our gradu­ation pro­jects. Chris­toph Noordz­ij came once a month to con­sult us and we dis­cussed our pro­gress on the pro­ject with him. Des­pite the fact that I had such a weird pro­ject, he tried his best to grasp it and really helped me es­pe­cially at the very first stage. He has a very sharp eye.

Chi­mera was born out of a sketch from one of those TypeCook­er ex­er­cises, right? Did you see it as a po­ten­tial dip­loma pro­ject right away? When did the sketch turn in­to Chi­mera?

Once I brought the draw­ing in­to class, Erik saw it and said, “Make an al­pha­bet out of this!” A week later, I showed him a few more char­ac­ters, and in the end I drew al­most all the lower­case let­ters, they were nar­row and weird. But even when it didn’t work out, I still wanted to con­tin­ue and see wheth­er it could work, I got ex­cited. I tried to pick a name that would high­light the crazy char­ac­ter of the type and at the same time sound fa­mil­i­ar in both Rus­si­an and Eng­lish. A chi­mera is a mon­ster with the head and neck of a li­on, the body of a goat and a tail of a snake. It’s a creature that is, frankly, quite dif­fi­cult to ig­nore. It think that the name does a good job of re­flect­ing the mad es­sence of a pro­ject that fits a square peg in­to a round hole.

As a graph­ic ex­per­i­ment, Chi­mera could be com­pared to the typeface Amalta by Vera Evstafieva. The au­thor’s po­s­i­tion is clearly marked in both the works: in Amalta—a study of the form halfway between broad brush and prin­ted type, in Chi­mera—re­versed con­trast with a dis­tin­guished ap­pear­ance. Vera said to us in an in­ter­view that Amalta does not en­joy com­mer­cial suc­cess. What do you feel about the com­mer­cial po­ten­tial of Chi­mera?

I un­der­stand that Chi­mera is a typeface that I won’t be able to make money with. Al­though you nev­er know what will be in de­mand in the fu­ture. You can re­lease a typeface, and only a few years later it will sud­denly be­come pop­u­lar. The ex­act op­pos­ite can hap­pen too, but it’s im­pos­sible to pre­dict. Peter Biľak told me that he worked on His­tory for al­most 10 years and the day be­fore re­lease he was tor­men­ted by thoughts like, “This will nev­er sell well. Too com­plex to use, too dif­fi­cult to un­der­stand”, but now His­tory is one of the best­sellers in his lib­rary. He told me, “Maria, nev­er think about that. Do what cre­at­ively sat­is­fies you”. Of course, there are al­ways people for whom sales are the main cri­ter­ia, they find a niche, build their own lib­rary and gradu­ally fill it. I be­lieve that if you’re truly pas­sion­ate about something, noth­ing should be able to stop you.

It would seem that there’s a lot of room for ex­per­i­ment­a­tion in this design, but I as­sume that the pre­ci­sion of the shapes re­quired a lot of ef­fort. Chi­mera is prac­tic­ally made up of pieces of art, which re­minds me some­what of House In­dus­tries ob­jects.

That’s prob­ably not a co­in­cid­en­ce. When I was work­ing on Chi­mera, I felt a great re­spect for House In­dus­tries, be­cause their let­ters really do be­come ob­jects. You have to look for com­prom­ises and find a smart de­cision. In this work in par­tic­u­lar, I real­ised how im­port­ant it is to fo­cus on non-al­pha­bet­ic char­ac­ters, such as the sec­tion sign, pil­crow, brack­ets, fig­ures, as­ter­isk, and so on. These are im­port­ant com­pon­ents of a typeface: if you look at a free font that’s been made quickly, all the non-al­pha­bet­ic char­ac­ters are al­most cer­tain to be shoddy. Where­as in any de­cent typeface, all char­ac­ters, even those that are rarely used, are giv­en as much at­ten­tion as the al­pha­bets.

Ob­vi­ously, cre­at­ing type is a very in­di­vidu­al pro­cess. Each de­sign­er has his or her own re­la­tion­ship with form and a unique look at type. Which de­sign­ers, foundries or pro­jects earn your ad­mir­a­tion?

I really ap­pre­ci­ate Erik van Blok­land’s Eames, at House In­dus­tries, I like how smart par­tic­u­lar let­ter­shapes are solved. It’s one thing when you look at the fin­ished work and think, “Oh, everything’s turned out great!” But it’s an­oth­er thing when you start to look for solu­tions your­self. Krista (Radoeva—ed­it­or’s note ) was in a sim­il­ar situ­ation when she was work­ing on the bold sten­cil style for her typeface Аманита. It’s a dif­fer­ent story to Eames, but she also had to find look for a clev­er solu­tion for each char­ac­ter so that everything worked to­geth­er. For both of us Eames was some­what of an ideal typeface as to in­genu­ity and work­ing with form.

 

 

 

 

I also en­joy what Paul Barnes and Chris­ti­an Schwartz are do­ing at Com­mer­cial Type and I re­spect the fact that Peter Biľak or­ders Cyril­lic from Rus­si­an de­sign­ers for his Ty­po­theque foundry. And it pays off well in the end—his typefaces are very pop­u­lar in Rus­sia.

When we talk about design­ing type, the search for graph­ic and ty­po­graph­ic ex­pres­sion, cre­at­iv­ity and so on, the me­tic­u­lous tech­nic­al work is of­ten left out of the equa­tion. What does your work­flow look like?

I used to work in Font­lab, but now I’ve switched to Robofont. I like its sim­pli­city, both in the in­ter­face and ideo­lo­gic­ally. It isn’t cluttered and al­lows you to cre­ate an in­di­vidu­al work­space for each pro­ject. Robofont’s com­rades—Met­rics Ma­chine, Su­per­pol­at­or and Pre­pol­at­or—make work­ing on type a real pleas­ure.

Un­til t]m I mainly worked di­git­ally, but now I try to in­cor­por­ate as much sketch­ing in the pro­cess as I can not only when start­ing, but dur­ing the whole peri­od of work­ing on the pro­ject. This helps me to find something new and to avoid cheap de­cisions that are im­posed by Bez­i­er curves. When I can’t get a cer­tain shape right, I usu­ally make a big print out and on top. Once I’ve found a solu­tion, I scan the sketch and di­git­ize it. Some­times it’s enough just to look at the draw­ing and you already know which changes you need to make in the con­tour, and some­times (as with Chi­mera) you have to pre­cisely re-di­git­ise the sketch to get the curve ex­actly as it has to be.

This draw­ing to di­git­ising pro­cess is very nicely or­gan­ised in Robofont. An­oth­er thing that makes Robofont great is the fact that, even if you really want to, it won’t let you for­get about Py­thon. I was al­ways pretty good at tech­nic­al sub­jects, but at one point I real­ised that I don’t en­joy pro­gram­ming that much spend sev­er­al hours on study­ing it every day. And it’s im­pos­sible to be good in Py­thon, like any oth­er skill—your know­ledge goes away if you don’t prac­tice it reg­u­larly.

An­oth­er as­pect of your prac­tice was a his­tor­ic­al re­viv­al of the Dutch geo­met­ric­al grot­esque No­bel, which was one part of your edu­ca­tion­al pro­cess. What state is the pro­ject in now? Do you still find it in­spir­ing?

Yeah, I did No­bel as a re­viv­al as­sign­ment. It’s a geo­met­ric sans serif, a Dutch in­ter­pret­a­tion of the Ber­thold Grot­esque. I didn’t fin­ish it and try not to think about it at the mo­ment—Wil­li­am and Chi­mera are enough for me now. When I will fin­ish any of those, I’ll start think­ing about No­bel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The last ques­tion is for you as for graph­ic de­sign­er: what sort of typefaces are in short sup­ply, in your per­spect­ive? What do you think about the range of typefaces that are rep­res­en­ted on the Rus­si­an mar­ket today?

There is of­ten a lack of styles in typefaces with Cyril­lic. Among oth­er things, the way the type fam­ily and its styles are or­gan­ized is what makes the work suc­cess­ful. Peter Biľak, for ex­ample, pays great at­ten­tion to this: his pro­jects of­ten con­tain a wide range of styles and weights. I of­ten hear type de­sign­ers say that nobody uses Black It­al­ic or that it­al­ic small caps are not ne­ces­sary. But all these things are im­port­ant and ex­tend the typeface’s range of use.

For me, as a de­sign­er work­ing with Cyril­lic, Fedra and Bri­oni have a de­cent char­ac­ter set and vari­ety of styles. There’s PT Sans for non-com­mer­cial pro­jects, and now it’s also pos­sible to buy stuff from Brown­fox. I re­cently bought Geo­metria, if only it had Greek—I of­ten need it.

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. That’s why I’m now re­flect­ing again on what I really need in Wil­li­am and what I can get rid of. It’s time to re­con­sider a lot of de­cisions there.