Bulgarian Street signs and graffiti

Vasil Stanev

Hello guys,
I used my Sunday time in lockdown (measures are more loose over here) to go through my hometown and gather some material of how Cyrillic is actually used here. I know some font designers like to look at hand drawn letterforms, so I picked the most everyday ones I could find and put them in a huge PDF (500 MB) so you can look at everything in detail. Hope this helps!

I take no sides in the whole "BG vs RUS Cyrillic debate", it's just how I choose to roll.

The document includes commentary and some translations (and some fonts I worked on )

https://we.tl/t-7bbmsrFv6o

Igor Petrovic

Downloaded, thanks! 

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Wow. Thank you!  :-)
But would it be possible to also provide maybe a quarter-resolution version? The huge size will scare some people off.

James Puckett

This is excellent. Thanks!

Vasil Stanev

For comparison, here is the alphabet that we were taught in school. It changed slightly through the years. For example, if I remember correctly, the lc /б was written with the flag starting from the left side of the oval, and the Й/й had the breve balanced (this here seems wrong). ь is a sign for palatising the consonant before it (hence the name 'soft sign') and so can never start a word, but for 'all caps' purposes there is a bigger version of the lc. Петьо, Йордан.

I am showing this, because, for most people, this is the starting point for developing their handwriting, as you can see in the examples. This is reinforced when their children start learning the alphabet. Some, like me, use a "print" version of the letters, which you can also see in some of the examples. 

Vasil Stanev

Here is the same writing style, which I know as "English куле" (Coule? Coulet?), in an absolutely gorgeous French textbook from the end of the communist era.