TypeThursday: Ilya, thanks for being here for TypeThursday.

Ilya Ruderman: Hello.

TT: Thank you for coming here. I appreciate having a conversation with you. I would love first to hear about your background in typography and type design. How did you get involved with it?

Ilya’s Introduction to Type Design

IR: Thank you for inviting me. My background started with one important Russian type designer. His name is Alexander Tarbeev. He’s a genius who has opened up the world of type design for many students. I met him in 1999 at the Academy and he introduced me to type design and told me about the Type&Media programme in the Netherlands, at the Royal Academy of Art [KABK].

TT: So you were introduced to Type&Media?

IR: Yes. With the blessing of Alexander Tarbeev I applied and was enrolled in the Type&Media master’s programme for 2004 to 2005. That year changed my life completely, because of the brilliant teachers at the Royal Academy, who are still to this day the best teachers I have ever had: Erik van Blockland, Just van Rossum, Peter Bilak, Petr Verheul, and so on. There were many brilliant teachers there who not only discussed and taught type design, but also the programming of new technologies and understanding of calligraphic backgrounds. In just one year, my life changed dramatically.

TT: After the KABK program you made the decision to commit to being a type designer.

IR: Yes. I couldn’t change myself after that. My only dream was to do as much type as I could.

TT: Okay. So what did you do when you came back?

IR: I wasn’t able to start doing type design when I got back. (laughing)

TT: Why was that? What was the issue?

Russia’s Changing Font Market

IR: Honestly, there wasn’t any place for me to work. The market for type design was so small in Russia at that moment that I simply couldn’t find a job. The only thing I could do was to be a graphic designer and work as a type designer by night. I would earn my living through graphic design, but spent all my nights being a type designer. I was balancing two jobs over ten years.

TT: For those who don’t know, could you paint a picture of the type design market? What was the condition of that market? It sounds like it was in its infancy.

IR: Ten years ago, I would say that the entire Russian type market basically revolved around just one company — ParaType. The number of type designers was around ten people. But the clients, buyers and users were quite limited too. Piracy was quite common as clients, buyers and users would typically steal fonts. Nobody wanted to pay for fonts back then.

Being a type designer at that time was something like being an unknown artist. You’re poor and you’re just enthusiastic about the thing that you’re doing, and it’s essentially your own problem that you cannot sell a thing. However, things have changed.

I have seen a dramatic rise in the numbers of graphic designers and type designers. In the industry itself, a few studios have opened shop now. We have quite a big community of people who really believe that type design is an important thing.

We also live in a time when the industry of typeface design around the world is experiencing real growth. We feel and see how it’s rapidly becoming a busy industry and quite a lot of new and different things are happening in the market. Brand identity is heavily focused on as larger companies invest quite a lot of money in their logo, and having a corporate typeface has become a common thing. So the industry is also changing. Not only in my country; it’s changing everywhere.

TT: It sounds like there were structural as well as cultural things that improved in Russia since you came back. The general support/ culture of designers and graphic designers interested in type and wanting to explore type has improved dramatically. Were those motivations to start Type Today?

Founding of Type.Today

IR: Yes. By starting type.today, we wanted not only to present our fonts, but also to invite those people who had become our friends over the years to be presented altogether in one place. Like Christian Schwartz, for instance, who has invested quite a lot into making Cyrillic for his typefaces and who, through his work at Commercial Type, was the person who pushed us in the direction of not merely opening our own type foundry (CSTM Fonts), but of making something bigger to represent his interest in the local market. We wanted to bring together all possible modern typefaces with good, quality Cyrillic. And not only Commercial Type, we are open for all independent foundries willing to join us. I don’t want to give any spoilers, but hopefully some other big foundries will be joining us in the nearest future. This is quite important for us.

TT: Could you explain what you mean by quality Cyrillic?

What makes Quality Cyrillic in Typeface Design

IR: The thing is that Cyrillic itself — by its origin, by its history, by its structure, in the characters themselves, has always looked familiar for Western designers. Cyrillic, for Latin designers, looks understandable. Latin designers usually think the script is quite structured. However, for each system of writing, someone who is unfamiliar with the script can, out of simple naivety, make one mistake in their design that ruins the entire readability of the font. The whole font becomes quite dramatically un-useful just because one character looks strange for the Russian eye, for the reader.

Most “system fonts” such as Arial, Times New Roman and Myriad have something wrong in their Cyrillic part. In Arial, for instance, the character Л (Russian L) looks like a П with a nicely curved left leg. Their shapes are too similar and it looks confusing. There’s a common mistake that Latin designers make with Cyrillic И too, making it look like a flipped N. So a lot of designers just forget that the contrast is the other way round here. The contrast is different. While the diagonal is the heaviest thing in a Latin uppercase N, in Cyrillic the stems have to be heavy and the diagonal is the light bar. That’s one aspect which is easy to illustrate in words. One mistake can break everything. So even such huge typefaces as Myriad, for instance, are not perfect and neither is Helvetica. It’s a kind of complicated thing. And that’s what we mean by “quality Cyrillic”

TT: There are these nuances of the logic that a Latin type designer won’t know because they don’t speak the language nor know how to read it. Would that be fair to say?

Collaborating with Type Foundries

IR: Right. But I see how this is changing by the year among Latin designers. A lot of them have started to do deeper research and to prepare their collections with better Cyrillic. As such, we’re feeling how quite a lot of typefaces are coming to our market from the West. For instance, Typotheque and Commercial Type are inviting Cyrillic designers to work on Cyrillic. I really like the idea of Cyrillic being produced by a native speaker. It is a better way than trying to having your own designers produce Cyrillic as best as they can.

TT: Because you believe there is particular value inherently built into having a native speaker design the script, versus people from the West — it all being designed together and housed in one place.

The Dynamic Nature of the Cyrillic Script

IR: Cyrillic is also different. I am from Russia, so Russian Cyrillic is a little bit different from, let’s say, Ukrainian Cyrillic. The traditions, the groundwork and contemporary direction in which type design is moving are also different. But this is more visible when comparing for instance, Bulgarian Cyrillic, which underwent a reform in the 1950s. They reformed the shape of their Cyrillic and made several characters look more Latin, with the purpose of becoming closer to Europe. So Cyrillic has some tricks.

And here’s another example of complexity: in the Soviet period, because of Stalin and the Soviet Union, the state started to invent some Cyrillic characters for minority languages. We call these “extended Cyrillic.” For instance, there is a tiny nation somewhere deep in Siberia who had a local language, and even a local writing system, in which they could use Arabic or sometimes pictograms. To make them part of the Soviet Union, Stalin just decided to teach all of them Cyrillic by adding several characters to the basic set. As such, their language became Cyrillic-based with its own writing system, and the spread of Cyrillic increased quite a lot due to this sort of thing. It is super interesting to produce such character sets, but sometimes we really question the existence of real readers behind these strange forms. At type.today we decided to cover just part of this Extended set. We took only the majority languages and are really waiting for any requests from the minority ones — I would be happy to see a real reader of some of them.

TT: It has nuances about it that are very particular. Ilya, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time

IR: Thank you Tomas for having me. Good luck with TypeThursday.