vDud'
Ilya Ruderman: Once in the late evening of December 31, at 10 p.m. I received a Telegram message from Yury Dud: ‘Ilya, you were referred to me by Pokras Lampas. I have come to the conclusion that the typeface that I am now using in my shows should be somehow improved. We are currently working on editing our new episode. Can you make it by 7 January? ’
At the moment me and Yura Ostromentsky were planning to spend the New Year somewhere between Sevilla and Granada. And we clearly did, of course, but after that we spent six days reflecting on the said improvements. We managed to design three styles, Mister D. was really happy with those. They indeed included them in their first shows of the year. Besides, we slightly corrected the logo as well.
But after that there was this thing that rarely happens to us — the one where the customer is super-happy with the result, but we are not. And it took us six more months to run after Yury asking him to let us suggest other options, and explain how we would deal with the task if we had more time.
Yury Ostromentsky: We wanted to create a voice with a wide range of tones, for it to be equally well used to speak about both wealth and poverty, both pain and stories of success. The things Yury Dud tells (and how he does) is largely about new languages, new vision, new values. For me, this project was important because when I design a typeface, I not only work with form, but also try to produce new meanings and new sounds.
IR: Yury agreed, and soon we showed him two typefaces and a whole bunch of styles, each with its own inner logic. And he liked them so much that he asked us to finish for him both families. That is how this typeface was born — now, when the exclusive license has expired, the typeface is called Lurk A and Lurk B. To finish the job, we asked my ex-student Nikita Kanarev from Barnaul to help: we figured out how to design all of it, and assigned him a task to reproduce our ideas. Nikita did a great job. Eventually, there are two typefaces, one coming in ten styles, another — in eight. We delivered them to Dud, and he said that everything was wonderful.
The typefaces turned out to be complicated, and we even ran a few master classes for Yura’s designers on how to properly use them. Some styles are good for small texts, others work well for long texts, all of them differ in slightly different flavours, levels of loudness. After all, the episodes of the Vdud show are also very different — some of them are funny, while others, on the contrary, are highly serious, about Kolyma region or Chechnya. Therefore the typeface provides for a million different possibilities, which can also be mixed with each other in order to achieve various effects.
