Schrift Magazine

Ilya Ruderman: A few years ago two of my ex-students, Eugene Yukechev and Rustam Abbasov, decided to launch an online magazine called Шрифт (Schrift, meaning type/typeface in Russian) and asked me to design a logo. I was awfully busy at the time, so I said to them ‘You know, guys, I have only one idea of what the logo might look like. I will draw it, and if you like it, you take it, if not — it’s no big deal’.

The idea was rather simple. It relates to this stereotype that Cyrillic resembles a fence. The word ‘шрифт’, when capitalised, will be read without any problem even if you spare all horizontal and diagonal joints and leave only vertical strokes. This is how our hieroglyphic perception of words works — we are quite able to decipher the basic shapes, their number and order.

The only two props are the thin lines under Ш and above Т. Clearly, me and Zhenya, we tried several options — a bit softer here, slightly sharper there, — but eventually got back to our very first version. As a result we came up with a simple and efficient logo — nearly a pixel one, therefore easy to scale. Take Ш — it made an excellent favicon.