Slab Serif Greek and Cyrillic letterform critique

Andrea T.

Hello to everybody! 
I'm new here and i'm really happy to share opinion and advice with you.
In the past weeks i've worked on designing a slab serif.
Now i'm stuck on greek and cyrillic letterform so i really appreciate some advices on their design.
So what do you think about them? 

 



Thank you!

Samuil Simonov

These /De-cy and /El-cy are ugly, sorry. The former is too narrow, the latter is too wide and their leg bends are too mechanical, like they've been bent around a pole. They need more elasticity.

/Ze-cy needs a top serif and some extra width.

/U-cy is suspended in the air. It either needs a stable leg (with a monolateral serif) or a descender, not a mix.

/Ef-cy is too small. A bigger more inflated bowl is needed.

/Tse-cy and /Shcha-cy have some defect in how their descenders are rendered.

/Hardsign-cy needs a bigger beak.

/Ereversed-cy is the wrong way round and needs a top serif. Keep the glyph for Ukrainian, though.

/Ya-cy's leg is a bit too long.

/be-cy is wrong. It needs to be different from /6. A more ramp-like tail would work in a slab-serif.

/de-cy and /el-cy - see what I wrote about the capitals. /de-cy cannot be as wide at the top as at it is at the bottom, give its vampire teeth more breathing space. You can also try some of the older lettershapes if you want. Trapezoidal /De-cy and triangular /El-cy look great with slab serifs.

/zhe-cy and /ka-cy are sprawling and lazy. Tighten them up.

/ze-cy and /ereversed-cy - top serifs.

/che-cy, /yeru-cy, /softsign-cy, /iu-cy need proper bilateral serifs.

I also don't like the shape of /che-cy's bowl. /Che-cy is better.

/hardsign-cy needs a beak that is a tiny bit bigger.

/ya-cy's leg is too long.

I have some reservations about some other letters that have Latin equivalents, but you'll have to show us your Latin first.

Your Greek seems to be missing some letters, but I won't comment on the shapes.

Andrea T.

thanks a lot for your observation i really appreciate your help. 
well:
/Tse-cy and /Shcha-cy descenders error it depends on a curve direction error.

I'm tryin to redesign /De-cy but i cannot find a proper shape for the letterform, I still find it ugly. The upper part of the letter must be narrow but i can't find the right proportion with the lower part, at the end it looks too tall in proportion to the width (especially in the light version), maybe older lettershapes would work better but i've never see them, so i don't have any guide.

The /Ef-cy is too small cause this instance is the mid of a mutiplemaster and for the Wt1 (the boldest one) i design it without serif to have a proper inflated bowl, i hope i'm doing it right

For the Letter /Ze-cy, /Ereversed-cy, both capital and smallcase, i really don't understand what you mean for top serif, better to say, i believe they already have them...:)

For the /be-cy letter i have read (don't remember where, sorry) that the terminal part of the tail have to be align to the ascender, parallel to it.

... finally, do you know if there are books in english where is described how to design cyrillic letterform?

Samuil Simonov

I am not sure if there are any good books in English that I know of. There's a handy fast-check post by Aleksandra Korolkova http://leksandra.livejournal.com/115861.html. I really like Yuri Gordon's Letters from Аа to Яя, which is sadly available only in Russian.

You can look at the letterforms of some existing well-made Cyrillic fonts to learn what works and what doesn't. Georgia by Carter, Kazimir Text by CSTM Fonts, Octava by ParaType and 21 Cent by Letterhead (mind the opinionated /ka-cy) are the most vanilla serif fonts with great Cyrillic letterforms I can think of. I can't think offhand of any slab serifs, though.

The serif in /Ze-cy and friends is not slabby enough (to my taste).

/be-cy is tricky to get right (italic /de-cy is worse, though). The height of the descender doesn't matter that much, it's the shape that counts. In slab-serifs and grotesques it doesn't have to have a double bend and you can straighten out the tip (keep it pointing slightly up) to avoid too much sixness.