KYIV TYPE - book :: Behance

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KYIV TYPE is a bachelor thesis focusing on the design scene in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. The book places itself on a middle ground between the typical Coffee Table Book, an emotional view of the city, including its inhabitants and a specialized design publication.

Essentially, the components of the book can be reduced to three areas:

1. VISUAL

These parts of the book contain the collection of design and typography objects and photographs that the author collected during his stays in the capital of Ukraine. They give an overview of what types of outdoor design, signage, posters, postcards, print publications and more you might come across on a trip to present-day Kyiv.

2. CONTEXT

In order to take a closer look at the works presented, some of them of a historical nature, in a suitable setting, the book provides an overview on the history of Kyiv, Ukrainian language and an emotional view on the city and its inhabitants. For this purpose, designers as well as all other Citizens - old and young, poor and rich - are invited to speak.

3. FACULTY SPECIFIC

As a third focus, KYIV TYPE includes a professional examination of type design, typography and design from and around the greater area of Kyiv. Type designers and creators present their work exclusively for KYIV TYPE and provide detailed information on their practice. The development of Cyrillic character sets will be reviewed, illuminated and compared to the Latin alphabet. One focus is on how to deal with Cyrillic languages in type design and how multi language type design can change, if we do not use Latin as a standard to work from. For this purpose, a custom type system was designed and historically relevant examples are shown.

All the contents of the book have been edited in such a way that they are suitable for people completely unfamiliar with the subject and typography - no previous knowledge is required. The individual chapters benefit from each others, but are not based on each others, so that a random access to all chapters is possible.

Kyiv is a spacious, green and open city, which carries a certain seriousness within itself. The open and printed book spine, the large, almost bulky format, the colour scheme and the open feel of the rough paper help to reflect this.

KYIV TYPE is printed climate-neutral on FSC-certified papers and is designed to be printed on standard oversized A3 sheets almost loss-free at a low cost. All original texts are, next to english, published in their original language, Russian or Ukrainian. To ensure accessibility for an international audience, all texts are written in English.