Difference between Cyrillic Ef Ф and Greek Phi Φ

Wei Huang
Wei Huang Posts: 100
edited 10:47AM in Type Design Technique & Theory
What's the recommendations on the design difference between the uppercase Cyrillic Ef Ф u+0424 and Greek Phi Φ u+03A6? I've noticed there’s 3 main differences:

1. Cyrillic Ef is sometimes more square than Greek Phi:
Helvetica World Regular

2. Size of the bowls are different:
Theinhardt Pan Regular, Cyrillic Ef’s bowls are wider
Sharp Earth, Cyrillic Ef's bowls are narrower but taller
SF Pro Text, Greek Phi’s bowls are bigger
Graphik Regular, Greek Phi's bowls are bigger


3. One may extend beyond the cap-height and baseline while the other does not:

Zed Display Regular, Cyrillic Ef’s bowls are larger and the stem extends beyond cap-height.

Neue Helvetica World Regular, Greek Phi’s bowls are larger and the stem extends beyond cap-height.
Also see SF Text Pro above, both extend beyond the cap heights but Phi is slightly taller but probably on account of the bigger bowls.

Would love some insight into these differences.
Tagged:

Comments

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,665
    The Cyrillic Ф in Helvetica World is based on Russian sans types of the 1920s. The design of that Cyrillic set out to be idiomatically related to Helvetica, rather than simply being based on shapes derived from the Latin, so it references a Cyrillic sans serif tradition with its own features.

    In general, the bowl of the Cyrillic letter is squatter and less round than the Greek, but note that there is a distinction in this respect in Bulgaria, where the bowl is very large and round. I would say that the example you show from Sharp Earth is very much in the Bulgarian tradition.
  • Igor Petrovic
    Igor Petrovic Posts: 358
    edited 4:09PM
    The variety of relations in your examples indicates a probability that different people did different sets at different production stages, which led to inconsistencies.

    I would be really surprised if curve tension is taken as a carrier of the localized form. In the Latin/Cyrillic/Greek corpus, that would be taking a type design trait to the orthographic level. That would be a poor practice IMO.

    John is right, Bulgarians deliberately standardized their local forms in XX century, and their recommendation is here:
    https://www.fontfabric.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Capital-Letters-Comparison-2-1-1130x640.png

    It's labeled as "rounded" compared to the "traditional," which is the rest of Cyrillic. You can find a whole article by the image URL.

    That leaves us with the rest of the Cyrillic and Greek. While the Greek lowercase set is idiosyncratic, and thus lowercase /phi (φ) is obviously different than Cyrillic /ф, my opinion is that for uppercase /Ф Cyrillic = Greek. And the width and height of elements (bowls, stems) are type design preference, not alphabet norm, and should be consistent.

    Moreover, although Bulgarian localized forms are generally well thought out, I think that here for /Ф, they have gone too far, making a type design trait an orthographic norm. It is true that this letter is problematic to harmonize with the rest, so it needs more width, and then consequently—more height. But even though 90% of typefaces would do that, it is a type design choice, sometimes on the level of optical correction.

    Think of /J in Latin, sometimes on the baseline, sometimes descending. It is important for some display fonts not to have ascenders/descenders for caps, because of the intended typesetting.

Categories