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
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There are plenty of things we dont know about our letters. Thats 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 doesnt claim to be objective or exhaustive but rather tends to be biased as an intimate perception of things.
Theres 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
Contents:
I. History
From a Drawing to a Letter
Linearity of Writing. The Direction of Reading
Tools and Methods of Writing
II. Techniques
Construction of Letters. Grapheme
Capital and Lower Case
Terminology
Optical Illusions
Text Dynamics
Visual Rhyme
Rhyme in Logos
Type Classification
III. Production
Type or Logo. Differences in Approaches
How to Start Making a Type
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IV. 33+33+33
(A separate account of every lower case and capital Cyrillic character: history, construction, variants of construction, classic specimens, constructive relations with other letters, a letter in life, visual rhymes)
Appendices
Supplementary Indexes
Index
Literature
List of Types by Producer
List of Types in Alphabetic Order
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Pages 3637: Type Terminology According to V. Krichevsky and V. Yefimov
Pages 4041: Text Dynamics and Visual Rhyme
Pages 180181: History and Construction of the Letter й
Pages 276277: Letter у in Life and its Visual Rhymes