A new Art Deco, and the hunt for Broadway Greek/Cyrillic

Tofu Type Foundry

I'm working on a typeface inspired by Broadway and Bifur. Both these classics have some lovely design qualities that I wanted to see combined: Bifur’s unweilding geometric discipline married with Broadway’s high contrast and (more) legible letterforms. I was also curious to see how far the contrast could be pushed. For the sake of simplicity this has remained an all caps typeface.

I could see this being used anywhere from restaurant signage to cocktail menus. It’s not meant for paragraphs of text. A lower contrast companion may be helpful, but I don't want the design to lose its personality. Here are a couple glyphs that show what I mean.

As an experiment, I've testing how the letterforms work when applied to other scripts—Cyrillic and Greek. I have zero experience designing for these scripts though so the design is likely full of flaws. While looking for reference of Bifur and Broadway I couldn't locate any signs that they ever received a Greek or Cyrillic expansion. Does anyone know otherwise? It seems overall that non-Latin scripts have very little when it comes to this type style.

John Hudson

I’m not familiar with Greek or Cyrillic in this specific style, but there are definitely examples of Art Deco Cyrillic lettering and typography. Look for e.g. Russian film posters of the period.

Andreas Stötzner

The typically stressed part of N is actually the diagonal (missed by many).

Your cyrillic Ц is incomplete.

Greek is, in this case, the most tricky, especially letters with syncopic stress pattern (Ξ, Σ). A very interesting task though. (I once did an Art Deco Greek with much pleasure).

Tural Alisoy

I tried to explain my thoughts in the attached file.

Tofu Type Foundry

John Hudson said:

I’m not familiar with Greek or Cyrillic in this specific style, but there are definitely examples of Art Deco Cyrillic lettering and typography. Look for e.g. Russian film posters of the period.

Thanks for the recommendation @John Hudson! I've been looking into old posters now and stumbled across a Russian book cover for Art Deco: Flights of Artistic Fantasy by Suzanne A. Sternow. It appears to feature Broadway with Cyrillic characters—but this could just be a graphic designer modifying the Latin to their needs.



Nonetheless, I though you might enjoy some of the other typefaces from various sources. The Й in the last poster is especially creative.

Tofu Type Foundry

Andreas Stötzner said:

The typically stressed part of N is actually the diagonal (missed by many).

Your cyrillic Ц is incomplete.

Greek is, in this case, the most tricky, especially letters with syncopic stress pattern (Ξ, Σ). A very interesting task though. (I once did an Art Deco Greek with much pleasure).

@Andreas Stötzner Great catch on the /Ц! I initially gave the /N reverse contrast because I was trying to emulate the "skyscraper feeling" of Plaza’s /N but I don't think it works as well here. I've make a couple variations of the /N but am thinking of ditching the last two in the PDF.

Can you explain what a syncopic stress pattern is? I tried looking it up but couldn't find information. The Greek definitely is difficult though. While looking through Parachute’s typefaces I found a unique solution for /Ξ they use in Marlet Titling. It’s got me wondering if something similar would work here…



And I must say Artemis Sans is classy! Love the rhythm in the letterforms.

@Tural Alisoy Those notes were extremely helpful, thanks for sharing! Here's a quick breakdown of the revisions I made:

• Refined /Д/П/К/Ж/И/Й/Ы/Б/Ш/Щ/Ч/Ю and /brevecomb-cy based on your suggestions
• Added missing “tooth” on /Ц and corrected contrast
• Localized forms for Bulgarian /Д/П/Ф/И/Й
• Added stylistic set for "stacked" /Ы, "thick centre" /Њ, and "flat-sided" /Ћ/Ђ (just for fun)
• New additions of /Љ/Њ/Ћ/Ђ/Џ/Ґ

I'm wondering if /Л should be localized for Bulgarian too? Glyphs app automatically has a localized variant for it. Also, should the Latin breve follow the Cyrillic and be a similar width? Or does Cyrillic require a wider form?

Tural Alisoy

@Tofu Type Foundry everything looks good. Regarding the last two points @Igor Petrovic you should check out this link written by It will be useful for you. Additionally, I want you to know that you need to localize the letter Л for Bulgarian. But there is also such a thing, the Bulgarian version Л and Д are used in Russian, Ukrainian and other Cyrillic alphabets, but not use vice versa. Bulgarians only use the letter Л and Д, similar to a triangular shape. Latin breve is different from brevecomb-cy. brevecomb-cy should be relatively wide.

Igor Petrovic

Interesting work, it builds a nice rhythm on the screen.

Tural is right about К and Ж relation. But then, maybe it would be better to have both of them with high waist, similar to the K on Art Deco: Flights of Artistic Fantasy cover. You already have the midline moved up on B, E, and other letters. But then again, this is a highly conceptual typeface, so it is by preference.

Also, since classic Л (not triangular) has no ball or serif at the left branch terminal, maybe a more pronounced curve would look good. Not the whole branch, let's say its bottom lower third. 

As per diacritics, because of the maximum contrast, I feel they are a bit off the visual center. I would try to move them to the right-hand side a bit.

Tofu Type Foundry

Tural Alisoy said:

@Tofu Type Foundry everything looks good. Regarding the last two points @Igor Petrovic you should check out this link written by It will be useful for you. Additionally, I want you to know that you need to localize the letter Л for Bulgarian. But there is also such a thing, the Bulgarian version Л and Д are used in Russian, Ukrainian and other Cyrillic alphabets, but not use vice versa. Bulgarians only use the letter Л and Д, similar to a triangular shape. Latin breve is different from brevecomb-cy. brevecomb-cy should be relatively wide.

I understand what happened now, I accidentally localized /П instead of /Л for the Bulgarian. Glyphs automatically added an empty localized character for /Л because it knew what I didn't.

Thanks for clarifying how wide the brevecomb-cy should be. The latin breve needs some tweaking too. 

Tofu Type Foundry

Igor Petrovic said:

Interesting work, it builds a nice rhythm on the screen.

Tural is right about К and Ж relation. But then, maybe it would be better to have both of them with high waist, similar to the K on Art Deco: Flights of Artistic Fantasy cover. You already have the midline moved up on B, E, and other letters. But then again, this is a highly conceptual typeface, so it is by preference.

Also, since classic Л (not triangular) has no ball or serif at the left branch terminal, maybe a more pronounced curve would look good. Not the whole branch, let's say its bottom lower third. 

As per diacritics, because of the maximum contrast, I feel they are a bit off the visual center. I would try to move them to the right-hand side a bit.

Thank for the compliment on the rhythm! In additions to Tural’s feedback, your webpage has been a very helpful guide. I appreciate you taking the time to write that article.

When starting this typeface I gave the Latin /K a high waist. But after introducing the /R it switched to the low waist solution you see now. The /R needed more space for the bowl than the leg and I figured the /K should be similar in design. I don’t mind the Cyrillic /К and /Ж having low waists, but I’m also not a native speaker so it’s hard to judge properly. A simple solution would be to create a stylistic set with high waist characters so users can choose at their discretion.

Interestingly, both Broadway and its spiritual successor Broadacre have different waist heights for /R and /K. Sadly there’s no Cyrillic support so we can’t see how they handled /К and /Ж.

——

I’ll play around with the “classic Л” and add a more pronounced curve. I know the leg is often tricky to get right so I didn’t try anything too crazy with the design. The advice I read was to avoid creating a “hockey stick” where all the curve is right at the bottom.

Good call on the diacritics, they do feel slightly off-centre!

Mark Simonson

There’s a version of Broadway called AZ Highway on Paratype’s site which includes cyrillic: https://www.paratype.com/fonts/az/az-highway/regular

Craig Eliason

Different waist heights are not uncommon in "high-waisted" (or should we say "unconventionally waisted") designs. The /K, but also the /H, /E, /F, etc. may be high but the /R, and also the /A, /P, etc. can be low. Essentially you might think of the design principle not being about waist altitude but about exaggerated bowl/counter sizes.

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Mark Simonson said:

There’s a version of Broadway called AZ Highway on Paratype’s site which includes cyrillic: https://www.paratype.com/fonts/az/az-highway/regular

Great find Mark!

Mark Simonson

The Cyrillic characters in fonts sold by Paratype should be up to the standards of the Cyrillic-using market. I find it’s a good place to check when I’m not sure. FWIW, Alexandra Korolkova of Paratype was a consultant on the Cyrillic characters in my Proxima Nova.

Thomas Phinney

+1, I too use Paratype catalogs as a resource for that purpose! Great stuff, super helpful.

Also, Maxim Zhukov consulted on Cyrillic for my Hypatia Sans back in the day, and nowadays I have been collaborating with Vassil Kateliev, who did the Cyrillic-specific design for Science Gothic, due to release in a few weeks.

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Craig Eliason said:

Different waist heights are not uncommon in "high-waisted" (or should we say "unconventionally waisted") designs. The /K, but also the /H, /E, /F, etc. may be high but the /R, and also the /A, /P, etc. can be low. Essentially you might think of the design principle not being about waist altitude but about exaggerated bowl/counter sizes.

This makes a lot of sense and actually verbalizes the rules I was following without realizing it. Going to save this tidbit for future reference!