BigCity Grotesque Pro

Ilya Ruderman: In 2009, upon the request from Yura Ostromentsky, who was then art director at the Bolshoy Gorod magazine, I designed a humanist sans serif typeface with ligatures, and gave it the appropriate name — Big City Grotesque (for more details, see here). 

In 2016, we launched our store, type.today, and it’s around the same time that one of my ex-students, a graduate of my Type and Typography course at Britanka (British Higher School of Art and Design), Olya Pankova, joined our studio as an intern. We started thinking about what project to charge Olya with, and thought of this typeface called Big City which seemed to have the potential, this feeling of relevance that we need in our library. 

We offered Olya to take this project on, redesign and release it as a pro version. It took Olya 18 months to redesign both roman and italics; she got rid off all the oddities that the typeface had since the beginning and extended the set of ligatures, turning 200 into about 2,000 — we thought it was important to preserve this element of the project. 

By the way, we have considerably modified italics — now it is rather oblique than true italic. The result is 18 styles. You can also customise and purchase a custom style of any weight level ranging from 1 to 1,000 at our store.