Cyrillic italics vs. obliques

Ray Larabie

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?

George Thomas

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 Larabie

Right, but there's are some situations where these alternate italic forms are inappropriate... that's what I'm try to ascertain here.

Adam Twardoch

To some extent “how humanist”, to some extent simply how much more cursive (dynamic) the italic is in comparison to the upright. The Futura and News Gothic both have obliques that are equally static as the uprights in the Latin. But Gill Sans (Humanist 521), Bell Gothic and Journal Sans New all have more cursive italics in the Latin. If you’re cursifying “a”, “g” or “k” (in case of Journal) in the Latin, then it makes a strong case for cursifying even more in the Cyrillic. 

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. 

Krista Radoeva

Unfortunately, there are no rules for this, it always depends on the design of the particular typeface. But here are a few thoughts that my help:

It’s not about how ‘humanist’ a typeface is. You shouldn’t think of these italic Cyrillic forms as belonging to a ‘humanist’ or ‘traditional’ style. It is just about construction:

1. If you have an italic that is simply slanted, without any changes in the construction of the letters in Latin, then do the same for Cyrillic

2. if you start changing the construction of letters in Latin: ‘g’, ‘a’ become single-storey for example, that is already a good reason to change the construction to the alternative forms.  

3. if curls have sprouted, I would also turn to the alternative Cyrillic forms, as the upright ones could look really strange, if you try to curl them. I haven’t seen such an approach, but I have serious doubts it would work.

It is true, as Adam says, that the jump from an upright to a cursive italic in Cyrillic can be more prominent, but I have never noticed an issue with that. After all, Italic needs to be different from Upright.

Christian Thalmann

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?

Alexander Stetsiuk

I'm not sure, but

Christian Thalmann

Thanks, Alexander! I adopted this one in the end: