Designing cyrillic characters — Typophile archive

Kemie20 June 2008 · 05:43

I don’t consider myself a typographer, but I’ve designed a few simple typefaces, and I do love to read and study everything type related.

I am now in a bit of a dilemma:
A company has contacted me, because they want to use one of my handwritten fonts for their marketing materials. For this, they need support for hungarian, czech, and polish characters, which should not be too hard a problem to add to my font.
However, they also want support for cyrillic characters.

I’m afraid of getting in over my head trying to accomodate this last request, as I really know nothing about Cyrillic.

Do you think this is doable for a novice typographer? I’m willing to put in study and effort, but can I get good results with reasonable effort? Or is it better to refer them to someone who can do a more professional job of it?

Si_Daniels20 June 2008 · 06:22

It’s doable but hard - for a contextual handwriting font we had made a few years ago, we had the type designer who’s handwriting formed the basis of the Latin study many Cyrillic and Greek handwriting samples, and basically learnt to write cursive Cyrillic - we had experts review the output and several rounds of refinements were needed.

Incidentally for the Greek it was a bit easier as cursive Greek doesn’t tend to have a lot of joining characters. As I recall the init