Exclusive Cyrillic for digital design — insights, technique, and history from the TypeLab studio
Fresh articles from our type designers and editorial team. New posts every Tuesday and Thursday.
Stills & Boon's recent variable-fit pairing for *Kinfolk* proved what we've suspected for months: axis-driven typography is no longer a novelty. We break down three production workflows that cut typography iteration time by up to 40%.
Read articleBefore the Thaw, a handful of Moscow and Leningrad designers were pushing Cyrillic geometry into territory that didn't reappear until the 2010s. We trace the lineage from Yakov Chelpanov's 1933 poster alphabets to TypeLab's own *Konstrukt* family.
Read articleContextual alternates, localized forms, and stylistic sets — managing OpenType features for a 1,200+ glyph Cyrillic set is a full-time discipline. Designer Masha Voronova walks through her feature file architecture for *Sovremennik* Pro.
Read articleFrom Google's *Product Sans* to Berlin's transit signage overhaul, uniform-stroke sans-serifs are dominating public-facing design. We analyze the accessibility trade-offs and why TypeLab's *Vektor Mono* took a different path.
Read articleMost people don't know that STC added Cyrillic to Times New Roman under Cold War pressure from Soviet publishers. Archivist Dmitry Karpov shares newly unearthed correspondence between Victor Lardent and Moskovskii Rabochii.
Read articleAuto-kerning engines still struggle with Cyrillic ascender/descender combinations like "щъ" and "фь." We compare FontForge, Glyphs 3, and RoboFont's handling of 14,000+ kerning pairs and share our house grid template.
Read articleFilter the archive by topic. Each category is curated by a different member of the TypeLab editorial team.
14 articles — market shifts, studio spotlights, and forecast pieces from our design analysts.
View all9 articles — archival research, designer biographies, and the stories behind classic Cyrillic typefaces.
View all11 articles — hands-on tutorials, tool reviews, and production workflows from our font engineers.
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