One of our typefaces took some classes over the summer break and is now able to speak almost every Cyrillic language on earth. We are proud to release the new GT Walsheim Pro family. Read the typeface’s story by Grilli Type’s Noël Leu. You can also download the updated trial fonts that contain both the basic Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.
Having been interested in Russian culture and history for a long time, I decided to enroll at the University of Zurich for a Russian language class. After one year of studying I felt familiar enough with the alphabet and decided to design the Cyrillic of my typeface GT Walsheim. I do not only consider my own cultural background as Swiss but also in a larger context as European. Typographically speaking the Cyrillic alphabet plays quite a big role in Europe, as a large number of Eastern European languages use it. I decided that Grilli Type, being a European foundry too, should try to cover the eastern area of our continent as well. Above is some of my homework I did at university – and yes I know, I made a lot of errors still.
GT Walsheim’s initial inspiration came from the lettering of Swiss poster designer Otto Baumberger in the early 20th century. So I decided to take a similar path with the Cyrillic, looking at posters of that time period from the Soviet Union. This helped me to decide where I wanted to head with the Cyrillic of GT Walsheim.
Together with Mirco Schiavone, who has a Serbian background and fluently speaks the language as well, I took on the task of extending GT Walsheim. We spent a lot of time and effort to shape the Cyrillic extension and give it its own unique character. A big concern was to achieve a good rhythm and colour when using the typeface for body copy.
Since Cyrillic and Latin share a lot of similarities it can be quite tempting to just quickly translate the Latin shapes, add the small caps and finish the job. But we wanted the Cyrillic to have its own personality, befitting the one of its Latin counterpart. The capital K for example was designed with a slope on its top leg to make the somewhat static looking Cyrillic more dynamic. This shape has also been traditionally used for Cyrillic typefaces. The same goes for the И (the Latin I) which in most Cyrillic geometric sans typefaces is just a mirrored N. We decided to give it a more classical shape that I consider more appropriate for GT Walsheim’s design concept.
Having covered all the European Cyrillic languages we decided to go one step further and design the alphabets for all other Cyrillic alphabet languages too. GT Walsheim Pro now speaks about 60 more languages from places that range from A like Abkhaz to Y like Yakut.
220 new characters were added to cover all those languages appropriately.
We also took the extra step to take the Bulgarian Cyrillic into account, which is more strongly based on Cyrillic handwriting and thus deviates from the Russian Cyrillic in a lot of places.
Download the updated specimen and trial fonts now to get a closer look.
