Under this much abused heading, you’ll find a juicy text about the use of frequency analysis of languages in type design. Initially, I wanted to compare the performance of several typefaces in English, Russian, and Ukrainian languages, but that would amount to a whole tome. Therefore, I will be writing one text for each of the languages separately.

This article is devoted to the Russian language and will be useful to those who create typefaces with Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, but are not native speakers of any Slavic languages.

For each typeface and each alphabet, language is a separate discipline. A typeface may look harmoniously in the Russian language, but appear awkward in Ukrainian or Serbo-Croatian. Similarly, the same person could be a great tennis player and a lousy footballer. Therefore, looking into individual languages seems more practical than the Cyrillic or Latin alphabet in general.