In January 2015 I was asked to draw an initial for the publication on the best Cyrillic fonts of the past year (2014) on Typejournal.ru. I started with doodling few very first ideas. Soon after I started thinging about what does the past year is associated with for me personally. Which of the recently released typefaces I loved the most. Prisma by commercial type and Obsidian by Hoefler&Co came to my mind. Besides them I also wanted to refer to all the reversed contrast projects that came up last year. All these mixed together turned into a strange creature. Last thing that I discovered much later was the shape of the top of the one, which is nothing else than Amanita by Krista Radoeva. Mind is a strage thing. Once you've seen something... it can come back in your drawings any time..
So frankly I did not invent anything, I just mixed few parameters in a different way. It is like a typographic "russian salad", mixture of all the ingreadients with lots of mayo on top of it. Which I though is acceptable as it is the top 10 list of different typefaces. I must say that while having those nice references in my mind I wanted to keep the lettering a bit rough, not perfect. More in a style of lino or wood engraving rather than optical perfectionism of the curve. So the lines in differ from each other a little bit, I wanted some of them to be a little bit incorrect, so that it looks a tiny bit odd and disturbing to the eye.
Obviously I should have done this thing with much less effort. It is a one-time-thing, it is a small piece of lettering, it is going to be used small. But for me it was an expetiment, an excuse to draw and.. an excuse to try something different, to have a brake from my everyday work.
My first sketch was ok, the client liked it and I digitized it. But when we put it on it's place it looked overdetailed. I thought — ok, I have to make it work. I don't want to gave up on the idea. (note to myself I should have tested it before, not after the digital version was "almost done"...). Besides the amount of small and thin details I though that it is going to fit more to the layout if I will change the proportions — make it narrower. I continued by skewing the digital drawing that I had and drawing on the top of the print out.
Narrower, less details, tail of the one — fixed. The new drawing worked well. And here is how it looks at the end.
