This was a rare request that we were excited to be a part of. While I haven’t traveled out of the US (with the exception of Toronto which I LOVED), working with international clients (or foreign languages) for that matter provides some interesting challenges but also intriguing solutions. A client recently inquired about calligraphy calling cards and wanted us to do her name in Cyrillic. I immediately contact the head of Society of Scribes and emailed probably everyone on that contact list inquiring about a Cyrillic calligrapher. To my dismay, there were none to be found! Google proved fruitless. I tried to hack a Spencerian script but it really wasn’t getting close to what we were going for, and me being the Idahoan that I am was as close to Russia as finding a native palm tree in our state.
So the search ensued. I have system fonts on my computer that have Cyrillic Alphabets but I wanted to show you all a few options that are beautiful if you are typesetting in Cyrillic. I’m sure there are many more out there and maybe I’m just challenged – but a few of my favorites from Veer were these:
If you’ve typeset in Cyrillic, what did you use? Did you like it? How was it different from the English alphabet when typesetting? I’d love to see some wood or lead type in Cyrillic – that would be awesome!
I’ve done some work that was in Russian, actually. I just used Helvetica Neue, which worked well. It’s a challenge because of how long some of the words can be. Unfortunately I didn’t have a condensed font, which might have made things a bit easier. Obviously, it’s like designing blindly because I don’t know Russian, so knowing where to break lines, etc. is harder, but obviously not impossible. I used letterspacing where appropriate, given the nature of the characters, which I would definitely recommend, and am sure you are doing. I have to admit, though it is rather fun typesetting in Cyrillic simply for the typographic challenges it presents that are different than Latin characters.
Hope this can help
US
http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=205
http://www.fontriver.com/foreign_look/russian/
Russian
http://dlyafotoshopa.ru/5725-400_russskih_shrifta.html
http://global-shoping.ru/programmnoe-obespechenie/multimedia-i-grafika/shrifty-page-2.html
Hi! I’ve found your pages while searching for letterpressed business cards in flickr. and love it much! you’re doing really nice and stylish things!
as I am Russian, I know where to find cyrilic fonts. you can find it here and simply download through “save as”. http://www.xfont.ru/cyrilic_fonts/
Hi, a bit late)) But here you could find some of russian calligraphers. Maybe it will be usefull one day.
http://www.calligraphy-union.ru/content/blogcategory/174/308/lang,english/
Cheers
Alexey