Navigo

Ilya Ruderman: Navigo was born as a project for Moscow-City (Moscow’s central business district) that wanted to somehow organise street navigation between its skyscrapers (read more details on that here). That is a geometric sans with an interesting design of letter terminals, vertical cuts that look like the remains of a square pixel. 

First we released seven upright styles and then began dreaming about italics. We dreamt for a long time: the thing is that it is rather difficult to properly design a slanted version for geometric sans serif — you get optical effects that often contradict the original structures. To design all the seven italics, we invited my ex-student Nikita Kanarev from Barnaul who had also worked with us on the Lurk typeface. And, after three years of hard work, we came up with these italics. 

This typeface is a bestseller among designers. As it was intended to be, it is often used for navigation, but once it has also managed to make it to the presidential campaign of one of the US democratic candidates.