Project: Improved Cyrillic design for v4

[rsms]

The past few days I've done some work to improve Cyrillic for version 4. Doing so I realize the depth of knowledge needed to design really good Cyrillic glyphs is quite significant:

• There are local differences (e.g. Russian vs Bulgarian)
• Some glyphs have very fine margins in terms of stylistic freedom that makes it hard to induce the "Inter style" into them (e.g. Л)
• Wide diversity of quality and style in existing grotesks with Cyrillic (e.g. Helvetica Neue, Linotype 2019, uses a Latin K U+004B in place of К U+041A)

Here is a list of Cyrillic glyphs currently in Inter:

• CSV of codepoints and glyph names: inter-cyrillic-glyphs.csv
• PDF overview, roman: Inter-roman-cyrillic.pdf
• PDF overview, italic: Inter-italic-cyrillic.pdf

Here's a conversation tree with some interesting feedback, sources and ideas: twitter.com/rsms/status/1653196861245898753

Here's a handbook on the design of Inter. This is a good place to start, before changing or creating any glyphs: Inter design program.pdf (Alternatively online as a Figma document)

[EldarAgalarov]

Looks great, at least russian subset. Maybe "Ж" and "К" can be redesigned.

Inter look (most worst, imho):

Alternative look 1 (better but looks like latin K, imho):

Alternative look 2 (even better, imho. Like inter version but without useless horizontal spacing bar and more vertically symmetrical)

Maybe you can create some polls so users can vote for the best version. Also need to test every version for readability on small font sizes :)

[kenmcd]

Some useful critiques of some Cyrillic sans serif fonts...

Cyrillic on Google Fonts: Humanist Sans
https://type.today/en/journal/humanist

Cyrillic on Google Fonts: Neo-Grotesques
https://type.today/en/journal/neo

Cyrillic on Google Fonts: Geometric Sans
https://type.today/en/journal/geo

Some pretty detailed examinations of letter shapes.
These are just the "sans" articles. Also two on serif fonts.

Another...
The relatively easy way to find out the quality of a Cyrillic typeface
https://leksandra.livejournal.com/115861.html
and
How to understand Cyrillic
https://info.paratype.com/how-to-understand-cyrillic/

[EldarAgalarov]

@rsms Uppercase and lowercase "И" glyphs are inconsistent. Green circle - looks ok, red - looks bad.

Uppercase:

1. Ink trap is present - ok;
2. Column base out of the body of the column - bad.

Lowercase:

1. Ink trap is is absent - bad;
2. Column base is not wider than the body of the column. Visually looks good - ok.

[EldarAgalarov]

@rsms
Lowercase "М" is not consistent compared to other glyphs with sharp corners. It has no ink traps:

Same problem:

If these ink traps on sharp corners (less than 90 degrees) increase readability on small screens then you need to add them to all glyphs that have sharp corners. Or remove them all. I think they are useless for Inter Display, for example. Just need to be consistent :)

[EldarAgalarov]

@rsms
"Ж" and "К" glyphs looks bad (I never seen such cyrillic glyphs before. I think other native cyrillic speakers will tell the same). Better to redesign them following way, by adding ink traps too:

[EldarAgalarov]

@rsms Maybe better to redesign "М" like this:

[rastvortsev]

Hello Rasmus
Alexander Vilinskyy asked me to help you with Inter Cyrillic.
I downloaded the sources Inter-Roman and Inter-Italic from April 5 and will try to improve the Cyrillic alphabet.

[rastvortsev]

This may have happened after font scaling, but now the thickness of the stems in the Thin font is sometimes 48, and sometimes 46. It probably needs to be one of them. Which one do we leave / assign?
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1L3cCZyicR19mjAJLhaBHz1MPGTb8f4qQ?usp=share_link

[rsms]

(for the record, Dmytro and I had a conversation via email regarding some of the questions above)

[bananakid]

Looks great, at least russian subset. Maybe "Ж" and "К" can be redesigned.

"Ж" and "К" glyphs looks bad (I never seen such cyrillic glyphs before. I think other native cyrillic speakers will tell the same). Better to redesign them following way, by adding ink traps too:

As a native Russian speaker I totally support @EldarAgalarov's points. In this Twitter post it's stated that original "к" design (top right) clearly originated from the Latin "k" (1-st photo, top to bottom) in XV century and after some deviations got back to the roots in 1960's. In the 4-th photo of the same post you can notice that it's Cyrillic Serif fonts that use current version of к in Inter. There isn't much historic references that I know of (as good as Twitter post), however you can examine Literaturnaya which was the most used book font of USSR (notice it's Serif font that uses к closer to the proposed version and ж exactly as proposed one). And another ultimate Sans Serif attempt — Unica77 (not the Monotype ripoff but the version recreated with the help of original Team '77) — uses the correct Ж & К design. Team '77 did quite the research on Sans Serif design and they posted it in Typografische Monatsblätter No. 4 April 1980 (you can download full-size scans in linked Flick album). Apple's and Microsoft's general fonts (San Francisco and Segoe UI) use the comments proposed design as well. Since Inter is meant to be a modern font that aims for a timeless design it should use better Sans Serif practices when possible and stay away from controversial choices. Not sure if my arguments are 100% relevant but I'm doing my best!

P.S. @rsms thank you!

[Daymarius]

Is this the final version of cyrillic for v4? Some glyphs still don't look quite natural in v4.0.

[ravid-dubsteper]

some letters are beyond x height

[rsms]

See Improvements to Cyrillic glyphs #696