Aaron Burns (1922–1991), co-founder and pres­id­ent of ITC, was a ty­po­graph­er and ty­po­graphy en­thu­si­ast who made a massive im­pact on the de­vel­op­ment of ty­po­graphy and type design in post-So­viet Rus­sia. Today, few people are aware of this side of his work, so we in­vite the read­er to take a closer look. A short es­say by Max­im Zhukov on meet­ing the mas­ter, or­gan­iz­ing ex­hib­i­tions to­geth­er and part­ner­ing on ITC Cyril­lics.

“If one wanted to ex­per­i­ment freely with Cyril­lic forms and rhythms, one would have to ques­tion com­monly ac­cep­ted prac­tices and dare to think dif­fer­ently” — Ir­ina Smirnova and Max Ilinov are map­ping the in­ter­twin­ing roots of type design and cal­li­graphy and dis­cuss­ing the un­ob­vi­ous.

The his­tory has seen ex­amples of in­ven­tions of writ­ing for en­tire eth­nic groups, however rare script has un­der­gone as many trans­form­a­tions and re­forms as the Cyril­lic al­pha­bet.

Pro­fess­or of ty­po­graphy, au­thor and edu­cat­or Gerd Fleischmann talks about the school Bauhaus phe­no­men­on, its time, mas­ters and ty­po­graph­ic­al pe­cu­li­ar­it­ies of that peri­od. “When I be­came aware of Bauhaus back in 1955, Bauhaus prom­ised free­dom. For me, it means mostly free­dom.”

Max­im Zhukov shares his views on the role of the clas­sic­al cap­it­al­is mo­nu­men­tal­is, as ex­em­pli­fied by the in­scrip­tion at the base of the Tra­jan’s column in Rome (113 CE), in the his­tory of So­viet print, graph­ic and type design, and ar­chi­tec­ture. Typefaces ori­gin­ally de­signed for set­ting lan­guages us­ing Lat­in al­pha­bet of­ten get ad­ap­ted for Cyril­lic and oth­er scripts. What makes the task of their “cyril­liz­a­tion” easi­er is the pres­en­ce of many let­ters in both al­pha­bets that share sim­il­ar forms, even if those glyphs re­late to dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters. Zhukov also elu­cid­ates the pro­cess of de­vel­op­ing a Cyril­lic ver­sion of Adobe Tra­jan Pro 3 and Adobe Tra­jan Sans he was in­vited to as­sist in.

I am neither a sci­ent­ist nor a sema­si­olo­gist nor a philo­lo­gist—my field is book design; I am also en­gaged as a type de­sign­er. Ques­tions arise in my work which are not dir­ectly re­lated to my pro­fes­sion. It may, there­fore, be self-evid­ent that my at­tempts to ex­press an opin­ion about some of these prob­lems may lead to cer­tain mis­takes since I am not suf­fi­ciently pro­fi­cient in all of the com­plex­it­ies these prob­lems in­volve. In spite of this, I should like to deal with one of these prob­lems in a very gen­er­al way—simply as an idea—in the hope that it will be taken up, cor­rec­ted, and re­fined by the ap­pro­pri­ate spe­cial­ists.

In So­viet times, with the “type as­sets” put on spe­cial re­gister by the KGB, the de­vel­op­ment of ty­po­graphy had been cut short. Like sex, ty­po­graphy had no place in USSR. At the same time, with the spread of hand-let­ter­ing the book de­sign­ers de­ve­loped a unique, ex­quis­ite “feel­ing of com­mand” of type, and draw­ing it be­came an in­tim­ate in­stru­ment of self-as­ser­tion. 

Civil Type and Kis Cyril­lic is Vladi­mir Ye­fimov’s es­say on the his­tory of Civil Script and the cre­ation of mod­ern Cyril­lic type based on his­tor­ic­al forms. Today, 10 years after its re­lease, the art­icle is not only still rel­ev­ant, but more cap­able than ever of rous­ing both pro­fes­sion­als and those read­ers who are in­ter­ested in the his­tory of Civil Type.