Lettering & Logo concepts for Rutenia festival 2017
Rutenia is an international festival of calligraphy and typography that is held every year in Kiev State Academy of Decorative and Applied Art and Design named after M. Boychuk. Festival started in 2009 year, and since then the festival has been attended by about twenty countries from all over the world.
The festival is a platform for communication of calligraphers, typographers, font designers, creative people.
The main program of the event includes contests, lectures, the exhibition of calligraphic and typographical works, master classes, and open-air events.
The aim of the project was to create a sort of lettering font with some calligraphy elements, ligatures, which will be based on the alphabet of my first calligraphy teacher - Vasil Chebanik. For the past fifteen years he has been doing the project of Ukrainian ABC. His alphabet is based on Greek alphabet, which sets Ukrainians apart from Russian (petrovka) alphabet.
My lettering & logo uses the same ideas, but has a completely different aesthetic vision. I did not try to come up with something new for the sake of the new and move away from already existed historical forms. So, basically, this font is like an archetype of Vasil's works.
The actual idea of this year festival was to add more modern, relaxed and underground spin to it.
The letterforms and coloristic I have chosen came up from the series of association words that I made up myself to accurately convey the atmosphere and the character of the festival.
Besides of using a traditional calligraphy tools I decided to use an ordinary marker, to make the letterforms more actual and clean. However, when I just started working on this project I also did some options based on calligraphy tools, more academic ones.
Lettering (early stage sketches & searching process)
Logotype
These were the final options to choose from.
