The Quest for Modern Cyrillic | Alexandra Korolkova, Dmitry Goloub | ATypI 2019 Tokyo

2019 is the year of the next Modern Cyrillic type design competition. The competition used to be very infrequent (the previous one was Modern Cyrillic 2014, and before that, Modern Cyrillic 2009), and many Cyrillic typefaces have been designed and released since the previous contest. Because the script is still developing (mostly in very detailed rather than groundbreaking ways), the most important Cyrillic type designers have their own, very different opinions about what contemporary Cyrillic should look like and how it should evolve. The organizers wanted to choose and show the less random and more representative selection of good recent Cyrillic typefaces as an illustration of Cyrillic’s evolution, so their primary goal was to hold the competition in such a way that the results would be as objective as possible. That&why they decided to overhaul everything, from adding new categories (like webfonts and variable fonts) to changing their way of judging. This presentation reports on...