Learn Script : Tool to help type designer to develop other scripts

Hugo Jourdan

Hi,

I'm Latin Type Designer, I recently decided to learn how to design Cyrillic to extend my type design knowledge. I'm not used to read/write/design Cyrillic.

I started to collect/search ressource about it. A thing, I'm used to do (even when I'm designing Latin script) is to check well-done typefaces, and check how they design a letter compared to another one, in order to learn how to bring consistency (outlines/width/weight/contrast...)

But this is a time-consuming process:

1. Find well-done typeface who supported complete Cyrillic
2. Open font file in Font Editor
3. Find glyphs to compare
4. Overlapping glyphs
5. Compare outlines/width

Instead of doing this manually, I decided to code a DrawBot script to compare a bunch a typeface automatically and generate a PDF. Here is a page from the PDF:



This allow design to quickly understand how different typeface designed a Cyrillic letter, by comparing it to a Latin letter.
For now, all typefaces picked are from GoogleFont, but I'm facing some problem, because some of them don't fully support Cyrillic (Unicode block). So I need to find some more.

This is why I need your help. Like I said I'm not a Cyrillic Type Design, so I can't judge if a typeface has a good Cyrillic design
or not. Could you recommend me well-done typeface who support Cyrillic (Unicode block) ? (And ideally typeface with normal width and including a Regular weight)

If some of you are interested about this project and want to help me, I could invite you as collaborator to a private GitHub repo to discuss more about it. For now, the repo is private, but as soon as the material is sufficiently advanced, it will be public and open-source, so that everyone can have access to it.

Actually I'm focusing on Cyrillic, but in the future I would like also to extend it to other script.

Disclaimer:
My Goal is not to "Latinised" other script. Rather, it is to highlight the differences between different scripts, so that type designers who want to learn about these scripts, do not fall into the trap of "I'll use this Latin letter for that". 
For now it's a Latin oriented script (because mainly from other script glyphs are compared with Latin glyph), but in the future I would like to the opposite too (For example, to initiate Latin script to Cyrillic designers)

Igor Petrovic

Interesting project!

In another thread, @Drawcard recently posted a link for Cyrillic's review. Here are that five articles where guys from TypeToday reviewed Cyrillic fonts on Google fonts, that might be helpful:


https://type.today/en/journal/humanist

https://type.today/en/journal/geo

https://type.today/en/journal/old-style

https://type.today/en/journal/transitional

https://type.today/en/journal/neo 


Although I as a native Cyrillic user don't always agree with them, I find it very useful in terms that they don't avoid pointing out what they deem as mistakes clearly, and they go into detail, pulling a number of topics for almost every character.

They focused on mistakes, which is beneficiary for the reader. But they named just a few fonts good while dismissing most typefaces they analyzed. I won't be so exclusive, even if there are things that might be improved I still think analyzed fonts often have a nice potential and that Cyrillic is not so "mystic" as one might get an impression.

Igor Petrovic

Also, I see a potential in your app for comparing two different fonts in general, not only comparing different scripts inside the same font.

viktorzumegen

I’m also definitely interested in the GitHub repository. For now I can't add anything, but it's a topic I'd like to get into as well!

Christian Thalmann

(Just a quick note: Alexei Vanyashin updated Cormorant on the GitHub repo after Ilya's review. We fixed some things, but left other things in place because they were deliberate choices, such as the stylistic separation of the modern-like humanist Cormorant with traditional letter forms vs the Trajan-like full-blooded humanist Cormorant Garamond, neither of which quite fit within a historical mould.)