Book of Letters From Аа to Яя by Yuri Gordon

Chapter “About the Letter Аа ” (pages 83–97, PDF, 870 KB)

Task:	to publish a deskbook on Cyrillic alphabet anatomy for designers, art directors, artists, advertisers etc.

It took only three years for Yuri Gordon, Russian designer, illustrator, type developer and engraver, to write, and the studio to compose, design, and publish the book about each and every letter of the Russian alphabet. It deals mostly with Cyrillic characters, but uses Latin letter examples as well.

Yuri Gordon graduated from the Art & Technology of Print Materials Design Faculty of Moscow Polypraphic Institute (now called Moscow State University of Printing Arts). He has worked as a type designer since 1976. Yuri developed his first complete digital typeface called FaRer in 1996. He is one of the founders of the Letterhead studio specializing on original Cyrillic typefaces.

Book in dust jacket

There are plenty of things we don’t know about our letters. That’s why my book is not about type, although type is mentioned here, too. This book is about each of the 33 letters of our imperfect alphabet as an individual personality. This is not a scholarly treatise but rather a record of my personal experience as a type designer, designer, and a draftsman. It doesn’t claim to be objective or exhaustive but rather tends to be biased as an intimate perception of things.

There’s another distinction: the book was meant for type designers and designers who, like me, are much into logo development. In a logo, an individual character is by far more conspicuous than in a text; so the niceties of the letterforms which would be rejected in a type as way too deliberate, gain importance here.
From preface by the author

Book of Letters From Аа to Яя by Yuri Gordon

Contents: