A Country Which There’s Isn’t

Yury Ostromentsky: We were doing this project in 2012, shortly before the editor-in-chief was fired and she left with almost all of her team. This was a golden age of Lenta: they issued lots of interesting special projects (that’s exactly when illustrated longreads started getting into fashion). This is how the editorial team was describing the project: ‘Journalists of Lenta.ru and the best photographers of our country drove around the entire former Soviet Union to show and tell what is left there from Soviet times, what has been lost, and what has appeared during the 20 years of independence’. The logo was missing. Upon reflecting on the subject, I decided to make it look like the title of a book designed in the USSR. The wordmark hints at Soviet display typography, all while having modern forms and proportions.