Type Journal’s Top Cyrillic Typefaces of 2014

This year has proved once again that the de­mand for ty­po­graph­ic know­ledge is really hot­ting up in today’s Rus­sia. The word “craze” would be just a bit of an ex­ag­ger­a­tion. The Ty­po­man­ia fest­iv­al and Serebro Nabora con­fer­en­ce are grow­ing in scope each year, while ex­ist­ing type schools have no prob­lems filling their groups and new ones are even open­ing their doors. The res­ult is an in­creas­ing num­ber of people both get­ting an idea about the pro­fes­sion of type de­sign­er and giv­ing them­selves a shot in this field. An­oth­er en­cour­aging fact is that al­most every year one more Rus­si­an-speak­ing de­sign­er gradu­ates from the Type and Me­dia course and enters the pro­fes­sion­al world. Nev­er­the­less, there is a flip­side to this suc­cess – sup­ply on the mar­ket is ex­pand­ing at a barely no­tice­able rate. Everything that ap­pears in the me­dia and is of in­terest re­mains in­ac­cess­ible to the gen­er­al user, either due to design ex­clus­iv­ity or au­thors’ un­will­ing­ness to cater for the un­tamed mass-mar­ket demo­graph­ic.

Let’s try to make a pre­dic­tion. It is ob­vi­ous that de­sign­ers and foundries are go­ing to be more act­ive in of­fer­ing fonts with high-qual­ity Cyril­lic, de­signed in­de­pend­ently or in co­op­er­a­tion with the rel­ev­ant ex­perts. The tech­nic­al level of such pro­jects will un­doubtedly be very high due to the un­fold­ing battle for screen­s and users’ at­ten­tion, which is, no doubt, the most rap­idly grow­ing type mar­ket around. It is worth not­ing that Rus­si­an in­die foundries have gained some mo­mentum in the past year and, what’s more, some new ones have come on to the scene. We are look­ing for­ward to new pro­jects from do­mest­ic com­pan­ies and stu­di­os such as Brown­fox, Let­ter­head, Para­Type, Art. Lebedev Stu­dio, the newly-min­ted Con­trast Type Foundry and CSTM Fonts, along­side works from in­de­pend­ent de­sign­ers and world­wide man­u­fac­tur­ers that de­mon­strated a dis­tinct in­terest in Cyril­lic. Against this back­drop, de­mand will grow not only for type de­sign­ers, but also for such rare pro­fes­sion­als in the Rus­si­an-speak­ing world as font tech­ni­cians.

Fi­nally, here are our top 10 fa­vour­ite typefaces with Cyril­lic of 2014. The cri­ter­ia have not changed since last year: the typeface must be avail­able for pur­chase by the gen­er­al pub­lic; an­oth­er re­quire­ment is the pres­en­ce of the Cyril­lic al­pha­bet in the char­ac­ter set and, fi­nally, the re­lease date should be between 1st Janu­ary and 31st Decem­ber 2014. This time, 37 can­did­ates from 14 coun­tries were in­cluded in the long­list (last year there were 36 – such em­blem­at­ic con­sist­en­cy!). The ed­it­or­i­al board and ed­it­ors picked out ten of the pro­jects by vot­ing, and they are giv­en here in strict al­pha­bet­ic­al or­der.

 

 

 

 

20 ko­peek

“20 ko­peek” is a di­verse typeface. Thanks to the in­geni­ous work with al­tern­at­ive char­ac­ters it is pos­sible to change the feel of the type with one click of the Styl­ist­ic Al­tern­ates but­ton. Take a look at the com­pos­i­tion of any of the 14 styles (from Thin to Black), and you will find two ver­sions of К, Ж, Я and R—curly like an Akz­idenz-Grotesk in the main set and with straight di­ag­on­als in the al­tern­at­ive one. A sidestory un­folds in the it­al­ics, where ob­lique ver­sions of the let­ters are hid­den in the ad­di­tion­al styl­ist­ic set. The type’s im­age de­pends on the ac­tions of the de­sign­er, who can make it old-fash­ioned or prag­mat­ic, re­fer­ring either to the end of the 19th cen­tury or the middle of the 20th. For clas­si­fic­a­tion lov­ers, however, it is a bit of a muddle, and any al­lu­sions to spe­cif­ic his­tor­ic­al grot­esques are noth­ing more than irony (look at the Lat­in let­ters f, g, r and y). Read­ers of Yuri Gor­don’s blog will re­mem­ber the story of how the an­ti­qua 21 Cent was cre­ated, in­spired by a com­pos­ite of late 19th–early 20th cen­tury typefaces (for ex­ample, the Cen­tury series and es­pe­cially Cen­tury School­book). The grot­esque “20 ko­peek” is a per­fectly co­or­din­ated part­ner to the afore­men­tioned an­ti­qua, and this uni­on gave birth to a font su­per­fam­ily. Both the an­ti­qua “cents” and grot­esque “ko­pecks” are co­or­din­ated in terms of weight, pro­por­tion and size, and, ac­cord­ing to the au­thor, were de­signed to be used to­geth­er. The font is com­ple­men­ted with small caps, as well as minus­cule and majus­cule num­bers, and sup­port a wide range of lan­guages.

 

 

 

 

Bou­quet

A strik­ing ex­ample of a typeface with a gentle ref­er­en­ce to an­tique Ger­man hand­writ­ing, us­ing a wide brush. An in­scrip­tion set in this typeface can be taken for let­ter­ing—the large num­ber of al­tern­at­ive char­ac­ters with swashes aids this im­pres­sion. The de­sign­er’s con­trol over black and white, as well as the whole out­line, is note­worthy. Bou­quet is re­mark­able for its dense dark col­our of type in the middle point sizes and ad­di­tion­al dec­or­a­tions such as flour­ishes if you are type­set­ting a large title. As a rule, the in­tro­duc­tion of such a typeface on the mar­ket rap­idly turns it in­to a reg­u­lar for sig­nage and pack­aging due to the ex­press­ive­ness of the names type­set in it, which im­me­di­ately turns them in­to lo­gos. It is in­ter­est­ing to com­pare it with an­oth­er ex­ample of cal­li­graphy re­thought as type—the Amalta typeface by Vera Evstafieva. They are sim­il­ar in the graph­ic­al basis, i.e. the wide-brush let­ter­ing, while their main dif­fer­en­ce con­cerns their po­ten­tial for text dur­ing fur­ther de­vel­op­ment. With Amalta, it would be the­or­et­ic­ally pos­sible with a de­crease of weight and con­trast and ad­di­tion­al char­ac­ter ad­just­ment. The lack of this, of course, is not a dis­ad­vant­age of Bou­quet, which is an artist­ic state­ment in it­self. 

 

 

 

 

For­mu­lar

For­mu­lar is a neo-grot­esque typeface in­spired by the util­it­ari­an 19th-cen­tury grot­esques, where ty­po­graphy ex­er­cises the power­ful func­tion of de­fa­mil­i­ar­isa­tion, cre­at­ing ten­sion between form and con­tent on a graph­ic level. Act­ively di­vid­ing them, Lorenz Brun­ner, Si­mone Koller, Ronny Hun­ger and many oth­er “Swiss” para­dox­ic­ally try to bring at­ten­tion to the con­tent, which is, per­haps, the num­ber one task for a graph­ic de­sign­er in an era that has lived through post-mod­ern­ism. The typefaces that we see in pro­jects fol­low­ing these aes­thet­ic prin­ciples are in­ter­est­ing with re­gard to the subtle “glitches” in their rhythm – some­times in­creased let­ter spa­cing, some­times the shapes of in­di­vidu­al let­ters. This new Brown­fox type fam­ily is al­most flaw­less—bal­anced in its out­lines, rhythm and op­tic­al de­tails. It dif­fers from its coun­ter­parts due to the in­vent­ive forms of cer­tain let­ters, such as M and W. (Just one de­tail makes the rhythm and “sound” quite dis­tinct­ive.) An­oth­er im­port­ant point in the struc­ture of this typeface is its pro­por­tions. For­mu­lar is easy to work with in dif­fer­ent ty­po­graph­ic­al situ­ations: it can seem light in a left-aligned com­pos­i­tion, then be­come a “wall” in jus­ti­fied text. Its char­ac­ters, pro­nouncedly pure in their geo­metry (tend­ing to­wards squares and circles), knit the line tightly to­geth­er, while the ex­tremely short as­cend­ers make it pos­sible to bridge between lines in para­graphs as tightly as pos­sible without los­ing air and the rhythm in­side. This makes it a ver­sat­ile tool, for ex­ample, in in­ter­faces and on web pages (a large ad­vant­age of the type fam­ily is the avail­ab­il­ity of a screen ver­sion). It meets the chal­lenges of titles, notes, menu items, stand­firsts and pull quotes equally con­vin­cingly. One of the most not­able fresh ex­amples is the edu­ca­tion­al pro­ject Ar­za­mas, where For­mu­lar is coun­ter­poin­ted by the Lava typeface. It is worth not­ing that For­mu­lar is equipped with minus­cule and tab­u­lar fig­ures, case-sens­it­ive punc­tu­ation, frac­tions, su­per­script and sub­script char­ac­ters, and styl­ist­ic al­tern­at­ives for a num­ber of let­ters.

 

 

 

 

Ger­be­ra

At first, the new sans-serif Ger­be­ra seems to refer to works by Ed­ward John­ston, Eric Gill, Paul Ren­ner and Arno Dres­cher, as well as mod­ern typefaces such as Eu­c­lid (Swis­sTypefaces) or Brown (Lineto). It is pos­sible to spend a long time en­thu­si­ast­ic­ally com­par­ing them, but what we see in Ger­be­ra is not only the geo­metry of Fu­tura and the flex­ible forms from the Arts and Crafts move­ment era, but also the shad­ow of Ro­ger Ex­cof­fon and his grot­esque An­tique Olive (for some reas­on, not as pop­u­lar today as the oth­ers lis­ted above). However, this may be an op­tic­al il­lu­sion be­cause of just one subtle de­tail, namely the small amount of re­verse con­trast in the char­ac­ters to which Ger­be­ra owes its spe­cif­ic rhythm. This Brown­fox typeface de­serves at­tent­ive ex­am­in­a­tion: the ex­ag­ger­atedly vari­able-width cap­it­als look sol­emn and book­ish, the re­verse con­trast is im­ple­men­ted with fili­gree pre­ci­sion, and the op­tion­al styl­ist­ic re­place­ments (lower­case a, up­per­case Q) sud­denly change the char­ac­ter of a word when used. Nev­er­the­less, you can­not help but ask why a sans-serif so ap­par­ently close to hu­man­ist­ic typefaces is lack­ing a double-storey g, at least as an al­tern­at­ive form, but, on the oth­er hand, this in­con­sist­en­cy gives Ger­be­ra a cer­tain charm.

 

 

 

 

Glober

On the sur­face, the Glober typeface does not seem ex­cep­tion­al com­pared to a num­ber of open nar­row sans-serifs, and the ra­di­uses of the curves at­tached to stroke end­ings look even some­what forced in places. But then you no­tice the ovals and half-ovals: made with skill, they shape the char­ac­ter of the typeface, and this is what changes our im­pres­sion of Glober’s ap­pear­ance. The ovals are “warm”, not mech­an­ic­al: the shapes of the let­ters o and e are pre­cise and force all the oth­er char­ac­ters to fol­low their ex­ample, cre­at­ing a range of flex­ible feel­ing in a seem­ingly un­soph­ist­ic­ated and stat­ic typeface mod­el. This bal­anced type fam­ily is re­mark­able for its 18 styles—from nar­row to ul­tra­bold, in­clud­ing ob­liques. Im­port­antly, there is an on-screen ver­sion of Glober, which makes it a ver­sat­ile tool for mo­bile ap­plic­a­tion de­ve­lopers and web de­sign­ers. This type fam­ily was the win­ner of the Mod­ern Cyril­lic 2014 com­pet­i­tion in the Text Typefaces cat­egory.

 

 

 

 

Iden­titet

Nikola Djurek’s type pro­jects of are of­ten as­so­ci­ated with an ex­per­i­ment, be it tech­no­lo­gic­al or lin­guist­ic. Iden­titet turned out to be a bold new in­vest­ig­a­tion in­to in­cor­por­at­ing the sev­er­al scripts that have his­tor­ic­ally been used (and still are) in the Balkans in­to one type sys­tem. This is a very high bar to reach, as the chosen scripts are drastic­ally dif­fer­ent in the graph­ic­al im­age of their char­ac­ters. With­in the Iden­titet fam­ily, Glagolit­ic script (in three styles—from an ac­cur­ate his­tor­ic­al re­con­struc­tion of an an­cient “an­gu­lar” Glagolit­ic to a more mod­ern roun­ded one), Bos­ni­an Cyril­lic, Rus­si­an Cyril­lic, Are­bica (a vari­ant of the Ar­ab­ic al­pha­bet for the Bos­ni­an lan­guage) and Lat­in all have a com­mon line thick­ness, ident­ic­al x-height and up­per ­case height, etc. This con­cerns all the de­tails, mak­ing it pos­sible to achieve unity with­in the sys­tem. Iden­titet is a land­mark pro­ject for a mod­ern world that has em­braced glob­al­isa­tion with its in­stant ac­cess to any in­form­a­tion, which, in its turn, re­quires trans­la­tion and graph­ic dis­play on bil­lions of mo­bile devices. Nikola Djurek has done some ser­i­ous re­search and art work—suf­fice to say, for ex­ample, that the au­thor has cre­ated new graph­emes in the “round” Glagolit­ic script for sounds in the mod­ern Ser­bi­an lan­guage that did not ex­ist in an­cient times.

 

 

 

 

In­put

This type fam­ily has a huge num­ber of mono­spaced styles spe­cif­ic­ally for com­puter cod­ing. A reas­on­able ques­tion arises wheth­er it is func­tion­ally jus­ti­fied, but let it re­main a rhet­or­ic­al one. The aes­thet­ics of mono­spaced type from the early era of com­puters and text ed­it­ors have long been pop­u­lar among graph­ic de­sign­ers. Dav­id Jonath­an Ross was in­spired by the cre­ation pro­cess of Verd­ana by Mat­thew Carter and ori­gin­ally design­ed In­put as a pixel font. When the ba­sic pro­por­tions of the let­ters were found, Dav­id star­ted draw­ing out­lines on top of the 11-pixel grid. As a res­ult, In­put can suc­cess­fully work when typ­ing code and for tab­u­lar data, as well as in plain text (tech­nic­al doc­u­ment­a­tion, for ex­ample). Curi­ously, the au­thor sug­gests us­ing vari­ous styles in code (in ad­di­tion to syn­tax high­light­ing)—from sans to serif. In­put is free for per­son­al use, and its site is not only a pro­mo­tion tool, but also a won­der­ful ground for test­ing and gen­er­at­ing a font with the giv­en styl­ist­ic fea­tures and char­ac­ter com­pos­i­tion. In­put was a win­ner of the Mod­ern Cyril­lic 2014 com­pet­i­tion in the Text Typefaces cat­egory. This was jury mem­ber Gay­an­eh Bag­dasary­an’s com­ment on the pro­ject: “Des­pite the fact that some of the Cyril­lic char­ac­ters could have been slightly ad­jus­ted in ac­cord­ance with tra­di­tion, the over­all tex­ture of text com­pos­i­tion dis­tin­guishes In­put from many oth­er Cyril­lic fonts due to the fact it has its fin­ger on the pulse of time. The mono­spaced typeface keeps its charm in Cyril­lic as well, which is a rar­ity in it­self.”

 

 

 

 

Journ­al Sans New

Journ­al Sans (its text ver­sion—there was also a style set for large-size com­pos­i­tion, see Cata­logue of Hand-set and Ma­chine-set Typefaces, Mo­scow, 1966) was de­signed by Anato­ly Shchukin and his col­leagues from the De­part­ment of Mov­able Types at the Poly­graph­mash In­sti­tu­te in 1940-1956. Ex­am­in­a­tion of the first di­git­al ver­sion of Journ­al Sans, cre­ated by Para­Graph in its in­fancy, iden­ti­fied a num­ber of prob­lems in its out­lines, let­ter spa­cing and kern­ing. They all have been elim­in­ated thanks to the ef­forts of de­sign­ers Maria Selezeneva, Al­ex­an­dra Korolkova and Ol­exa Volochay, but that is not even the most im­port­ant thing. It is a known fact that the typeface ly­ing at the heart of Journ­al Sans is Erbar-Grotesk (Jakob Erbar, Lud­wig & May­er, 1929)—its pro­por­tions, geo­met­ric­al struc­ture and range of styles are all sim­il­ar. This up­date of Journ­al Sans in­cludes sub­stan­tial re­vi­sion and re­fine­ment of char­ac­ters that ex­is­ted in met­al form dur­ing So­viet times: many let­ter­forms have been sim­pli­fied and their ori­gin­al ver­sions (к and ж, for ex­ample) are hid­den in the Open­Type fea­tures set. These very ac­tions have brought Erbar-Grotesk and Journ­al Sans Serif to­geth­er again. In ad­di­tion, the range of styles has been ex­pan­ded: prop­er it­al­ics (rather than an ob­lique style) has ap­peared, as well as two head­er styles. It would seem that Journ­al Sans New is no longer re­min­is­cent of So­viet magazines like “Sci­en­ce and Life” filed away be­hind pol­ished brown cab­in­et doors, and is a power­ful tool for con­tem­por­ary design work. And yet, if you still want to in­dulge in a little nos­tal­gia, you can al­ways use the al­tern­at­ive tri­an­gu­lar л and д, which will im­me­di­ately change the type’s “age”.

 

 

 

 

Stem

Many de­sign­ers have en­vi­sioned a Cyril­lic Gotham, and Stem seems a ser­i­ous at­tempt to ful­fil this dream. But the fea­ture that really sets this typeface apart, ex­cept for its visu­al fea­tures, is the it­al­ics. While the up­right style tries to main­tain a cer­tain ri­gid­ity and re­straint, the use of it­al­ics rather than the ex­pec­ted slanted let­ter­forms no­tice­ably soften its im­age to be­come more friendly and ac­com­mod­at­ing. Twelve styles, from ex­tra-nar­row to bold, in­clude it­al­ics, small caps, dif­fer­ent styl­ist­ic sets for num­bers, al­tern­at­ive forms of char­ac­ters (a, к, ж)—and this is only the first part of a pro­ject de­signed for large-size dis­play type­set­ting. Ac­cord­ing to the au­thors, the re­lease of new typefaces for text com­pos­i­tion, in­clud­ing cap­tion styles, is on the ho­ri­zon.

 

 

 

 

Woodkit

This pro­ject by On­drej has re­an­im­ated wooden dis­play type char­ac­ters as an aes­thet­ic ob­ject. As the au­thor says, work­ing with Woodkit re­sembles play­ing with build­ing blocks. You have three sep­ar­ate fam­il­ies (Sol­id, Print and Re­print with var­ied de­grees of print de­grad­a­tion) at your dis­pos­al, each con­tain­ing 6 dif­fer­ent styles with or­na­ments. With Open­Type en­abled, one can find fun vari­ations and use Woodkit for all it is worth—all 10,000+ glyphs. This im­press­ive dis­play typeface was one of the win­ners of the Mod­ern Cyril­lic 2014 com­pet­i­tion. The typeface was high­lighted by jury mem­ber Yuri Gor­don: “Woodkit is a typeface pro­ject re­mark­able in its design and bril­li­ant in its con­cep­tion. This type sys­tem, con­sist­ing of ex­tremely var­ied, but per­fectly matched glyph blocks, makes it pos­sible to con­struct ex­traordin­ary houses/in­scrip­tions/pic­tures, where each let­ter catches the eye, and a simple com­pos­i­tion turns in­to a fin­ished poster. But it is also eas­ily read­able! You can play with Woodkit as if it were a con­struc­tion toy, build­ing either words or ab­stract com­pos­i­tions from the or­na­ments and sym­bols in­cluded in the sys­tem. For me, this set is both a blast from the past with its wooden let­ters, and a tip of the hat to the fu­ture with its dy­nam­ic ty­po­graphy and in­trins­ic­ally valu­able ty­po­graph­ic games, which are not linked to prac­tic­al pur­poses, as was pre­vi­ously the case. It is, per­haps, the world’s first kit for The Glass Bead Game.”