This page covers type design in Russia / the Soviet Union / the old USSR. Russian designer of Rublenaya Shadow (1957). This page covers Cyrillic type design in general.] SWITCH TO INDEX FILE. 10four design [Matt Heximer]. Russian designer of Rublenaya Shadow (1957). Anton Selleshiy (Lviv, Ukraine) created the broken bones font Krukevichu Shrift in 2015.

Everyday designs using Zhurnalnaya roublennaya Type production in the young Soviet Union In the communist period, Soviet consumer goods were limited both in number and in regards to aesthetic options to choose from. It was the same with typefaces for books, posters, newspapers, etc.

There were only few of them: the same recognizable characters appeared on greyish cinema tickets and from art books to magazines for children. The geometric sans serif typeface was Zhurnalnaya roublennaya, as grey and dull as everyday communist life itself. Beside its own type foundries, Tsarist Russia had a few branch offices of European ones. Chief among them, H. Berthold AG from Germany, acquired a smaller type foundry in St.

Petersburg in 1900, and another one in Moscow in 1901. At that time Berthold was one of the biggest type foundries in the world, and so its typefaces quickly spread throughout Russia.

After the communist revolution the Russian printing industry continued to use existing fonts, often from Western companies, but in the 1930s there was an evident need to create the Soviet empire’s own printing equipment and typefaces. This was especially the case as the Iron Curtain started to descend and the material heritage of the previous imperial time wore out. Later Soviet Union specimens of Zhurnalnaya roublennaya with Latin and Cyrillic, designed by Anatoly Schukin Those sources also mention the German typeface as a prototype, created by Jakob Erbar for the Ludwig & Mayer foundry in 1922. It was very popular in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Its geometrically-shaped, rounded characters and sober look fit nicely into the period’s visual image.

Nowadays, Erbar is only rarely being used. Perhaps the reason is Erbar’s absence in the Letraset library in the 1970s, or during the early digital era of the 1990s. Although the color of Erbar in body copy is similar to Roublennaya’s, the microshapes of the letters are not the same. Erbar is too fancy to be the sole father of Zhurnalnaya roublennaya.

Specimens of Erbar-Grotesk, designed by Jakob Erbar The year 1947 was an exceptional time to release a typeface in Russia. The design process had started before WWII and was finished very shortly after — two years is not a long time after fighting a war of near-total destruction. But the Soviet Union was on the winner’s side and removed several of Germany’s metal and machine enterprises. Those started a new life in Soviet cities. For example, the Opel car factory’s production was, and the Opel Kadett was renamed the Moskvitsch. Printing equipment and fonts were also a part of the metal and machine industry.

On the face of it, the typeface’s release seems to fit this simple pattern of a direct copy. But its actual history is more complicated.

Modernist typefaces in the 1920s and 1930s When Bauhaus members discussed the meaning and appearance of typefaces, they raised the question of form. Getting rid of ornament also meant beginning a search for essential shapes of letters. Sbornik tehnologicheskih kart belorusskih blyud onlajn. The square, circle, and triangle were the geometrical figures that were accepted by modernists as possible shapes of characters. Although the essential geometry of type didn’t reach the public at the time, it drove type foundries to initiate their own investigations. Super-Grotesk, designed by Arno Drescher Another typeface bearing the same early modernist feeling is, designed by Arno Drescher in 1932 for Schriftguss AG in Dresden. Schriftguss, which was located in Eastern Germany, was made a part of VEB Typoart in 1951. With Typoart as the only type foundry in the country after that, Super-Grotesk became the main sans serif typeface of the GDR.