Cyrillic italics vs. obliques

Ray LarabieRay Larabie Posts: 1,376
edited July 2015 in Technique and Theory
When designing Cyrillic, some of the italics can take vastly different forms.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cyrillic-italics-nonitalics.png

But in some Cyrillic designs, the italics are oblique and the letterforms don't change. I'm trying to figure out the borderline where these traditional forms would be inappropriate.

If I were doing an old timey Cheltenham sort of design, I'd go with the alternate (traditional) italic Cyrillic forms.
If I were designing a square, high-tech spaceship font, I'd likely go with oblique forms.

But I'm not sure where the borderline is. When I look at Paratype's italics, News Gothic has oblique forms while Humanist 521 and Journal Sans have traditional forms.
https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/paratype/news-gothic/italic/glyphs.html
https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/paratype/humanist-521-bt/italic-128520/glyphs.html
https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/paratype/journal-sans-new/italic/glyphs.html

It seems like the borderline has to do with "how italic" the a-z is.

An oversimplification:

1: Just slanted
2: A bit more italic: the f has a descender and the a in monocular
3: Somewhat italic: curls have sprouted
...
10: Full blown Caslon

Bell Gothic has a italic that would be somewhere between 2 and 3 yet it has the traditional Cyrillic italic forms.
https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/paratype/bell-gothic-bt/italic/glyphs.html

And Futura has oblique forms.
https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/paratype/futura-book/futura-medium-italic/glyphs.html

Is it a case of "how humanist" the design is?






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Comments

  • This might be helpful. Scroll down until a chart on the right side with three colored columns appears.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script

  • Ray LarabieRay Larabie Posts: 1,376
    Right, but there's are some situations where these alternate italic forms are inappropriate... that's what I'm try to ascertain here.
  • I'm just starting on the Italic of my Cyrillic inventory of Cormorant now. I've been wondering how best to render the descenders of /tse et al. in Italic...  I'm tempted to use a backward swash, but I seem to remember that's not well liked. On the other hand, a sharp serif spike like I'm using in the Roman also seems a bit out of character for the Italic. What to do?
  • I'm not sure, but

    tse.PNG 32.3K
  • Thanks, Alexander! I adopted this one in the end:



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