When designing Cyrillic, some of the italics can take vastly different forms.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cyrillic-italics-nonitalics.pngBut 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.htmlhttps://www.myfonts.com/fonts/paratype/humanist-521-bt/italic-128520/glyphs.htmlhttps://www.myfonts.com/fonts/paratype/journal-sans-new/italic/glyphs.htmlIt 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.htmlAnd Futura has oblique forms.
https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/paratype/futura-book/futura-medium-italic/glyphs.htmlIs it a case of "how humanist" the design is?
Comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script
One could say that the traditional Cyrillic upright lowercase is by definition far more static than the Latin upright lowercase. It lacks open round forms such as “u”, “n”, “h”, “m”, which in Latin are already very cursive compared with the uppercase. If you take a dynamic scale (0 — fully static, 100 — fully dynamic), then Latin upright uppercase is 0 but Latin upright lowercase is 40. So you get an overall score of 30 or so. But the traditional Cyrillic uppercase and lowercase are both 0. With the Latin italic lowercase, you cursify only some glyphs, so you raise the dynamics to 60-70. With the Cyrillic italic lowercase, if you choose to cursify, you also go to 60-70, but you go from 0, not from 40 like in Latin. So the jump is indeed quite large. But the overall effect is still more static than Latin because the italic is usually used as a secondary typeface for emphasis.
Note that many Bulgarian type designers prefer the more cursive Cyrillic forms even in the uprights (in order to get more open and round lowercase and escape the “small caps effect”). So they are effectively trying to achieve a similar dynamism in the upright lowercase as Latin already has.
BTW, Maria Doreuli’s William is a splendid (not just) Cyrillic Caslon.