Kyiv Type Foundry is conserving the architectural heritage of Ukraine by pulling typefaces out from underground

Founded in 2021 by Yevgeniy Anfalov and Oleś Gergun, the Kyiv Type Foundry crafts custom fonts that aren’t only for use in design projects – they provide new perspectives on Cyrillic heritage in typography too. The pair define their practice as a “playground at the intersection of Latin and Cyrillic scripts”, and they share a fascination with reviving and remixing vintage letterforms distinct to Slavic alphabets. You can usually find Yevgeniy and Oleś working on type design projects that honour lengthy research, giving new life to the often overlooked fragments of typography found in the architecture of their surroundings, or hidden in the pages of books they find in flea markets and libraries. Their latest project, Kyiv Metro Fonts, continues this spirit of foraging, finding and looking at things anew, and is deeply interwoven with the history of their shared home.

Built on the results of a week-long student workshop in the summer of 2023, the foundry’s Metro font family is a development in the duo’s typographic research of Kyiv, through which, metro stations became new sites of discovery. Originally built as nuclear bomb shelters in the 1960s, the stations are now being once again used for their initial purpose. For thousands of the city’s inhabitants, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, these underground spaces have become a portion of the city’s architecture that has preserved its memory in landscapes of war – where a rich typographic history also quietly sits.

Yevgeniy and Oleś’ five collaborative lettersets draw inspiration from the city’s original metro fonts – a remaining piece of Kyiv’s past that a group of designers’ were asked to document, analyse and repurpose as material for new and visionary fonts, vessels for their history to live on. The results are a testament to preserving the memory of a place in letter form; a stark resistance to a world of slick, or in their words, “superficial” type trends, and a turn to everything vernacular, slow and local for the making of typography.

Here, the duo discuss the font family’s firm roots in the city’s past and present, the importance of taking a critical and balanced approach to typographic revival, and their resistance to letting go of Ukraine’s history, in all its difficulties, in order to reclaim the country’s soviet scripts.

It’s Nice That (INT):To begin, can you tell us a bit about the foundry and how it started?

Yevgeniy Anfalov (YA): The idea for Kyiv Type Foundry (KTF) began in Germany during a meeting between myself and Oleś Gergun, my creative partner. We bonded over our love for Cyrillic type design heritage, vernacular typography, and our understanding of the design culture in Kyiv, my hometown and Oleś’s adopted home.

Oleś Gergun (OG): We realised that design practices in Ukraine were narcissistic rather than critical.

YA: So we formed KTF to respond to this realisation, seeking a critical approach to local visuality that would pay due respect to the country and our city’s rich history.

OG: KTF is a psychological program that treats local design complexes, if you like. A movement to accept ourselves as we are, with all the visual trash and the past we went through. Studying the local context in Ukraine is way more pleasing than scrolling.

YA: We initially started as a platform for Cyrillic fonts. I received intense training in Latin type design at University of Art and Design Lausanne (ECAL) in Switzerland. Expanding my practice and learning to design Cyrillic felt natural, as I’m bilingual and read a lot in Cyrillic. KTF was made to be a playground at the intersection of Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Our ongoing research sparks from the central question: how do they enrich each other?

We do slow type design. Our outcome is based on lengthy research periods, both locally, in our surrounding area, and in the pages of books we find in flea markets and libraries. I often hear complaints from my peers about the need for good Cyrillic fonts, but this is not the case if you look back at uncovered fields, and that’s what we want to explore.

We’re treating the overlooked and overshadowed first. So far, these have come in the form of Soviet legacy fonts, based on typefaces dating back to the simultaneous rise of the USSR and modernist design with the first batch of our releases dealing with a critical evaluation of Soviet typography.

In 2021, before the big war, we were interested in the 60s and 70s in Soviet-Ukrainian design. And now – Ukraine lives through an iconoclastic period as a result of the failing politics of decommunisation and war-related trauma. Still, we have to remember that this was caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine that started in 2014 and grew into a full-scale invasion in 2022.

A typical reaction to this in Ukraine is: ‘The invaders are proud of the Soviet past, so we’ll destroy all the symbols and signs of it here.’ Unfortunately, a lot of good stuff becomes a target of this stigmatisation and subsequent destruction, labeled as Soviet or Russian. We thought we needed a more critical approach, one that goes beyond the glorification or demonisation of cultural artefacts. For society, this requires time and distance. As someone living between two contexts, the Ukrainian and the European, it may be easier for us to gain some distance to the subject matter.

It’s Nice That (INT):Can you tell us a bit about the Kyiv Metro Fonts project?

YA: Typefaces in foundry shops are often presented without historical information: a pure form left to the viewer, occasionally charged with cultural connotations. We’re not happy with doing just that. So Kiev Metro Fonts is a collection of typefaces concerned with our mission to preserve Kyiv’s vanishing Cyrillic typographic landscape and its further synthesis.

In the run-up to designing the typefaces we hosted a workshop forerunner – a lecture at Cooper Union NY, taking the form of an imaginary walk through Kyiv, superimposing the city’s destruction from February to March of 2022 and the geography of the place we grew up in.

For example, we were looking at the destruction occurring in places such as Lukianivska and, Babyn Yar representing the completely erased Yiddish culture of Kyiv through the current Russian invasion. To counter the Russian destruction and these iconoclastic tendencies, we were trying to document found artefacts, producing typefaces based on them, and then framing them contextually by writing about them. The most fitting format for this was to interview someone on the metro topic: metro historian Oleg Totsky. It felt logical to have a separate landing page for this part of the project as this is how the Kyiv Metro Fonts idea came into being.

Shortly after, we spontaneously announced a workshop for Ukrainians who wanted to learn the basics of type design. Instead of working with Latin, we emphasised Cyrillic. We let them analyse these metro station wall letterings and by doing so, introduced a sensitivity for the local, pushing them to go beyond superficial trends for type design. We explained that the project is a springboard for a potential font bundle for a good cause: they will be for free for Ukrainians and by donation for the rest of the world – to help the military. We ended up proposing a period of close collaboration with us to those interested in finalising fonts afterward.

OG: Nobody has done anything like this, so we thought we had to do it.

INT: How did you structure the week-long workshop? What kinds of outcomes did it produce?

YA: It was entirely made online via Around and Figma. I love the moment when multiple cursors simultaneously navigate the canvas; you feel the energy. We discussed styles represented in the Metro and slowly built up a collection of reappearing letterforms. Students picked their favourites, re-drew them, and completed their Cyrillic alphabets. We also tested a collaborative format, where two people worked on the same source. Of course, more than a week is needed to produce a fully working typeface, however, we pushed the students hard to get the most results in the given time frame.

INT: How did you select the five final fonts for the family from the workshop?

YA: We cast out existing typefaces like Arial Bold Italic or Benguiat. Then we took the most representative of them from the collection. The fonts were then structured stylistically and chronologically.

The Kyiv subway system is the deepest in Europe. The first stations from the 1960s were built as nuclear bomb shelters. These stations have a specific uppercase serif style cast in brass which represents a neoclassical period in architecture. Then came techno-like letters of the mid-70s, a total turn in aesthetics – square letters, almost like Euro-style. So standard letters in the collection represent the first two lines built: the Red (KTF Metro Roman) and the Blue (KTF Metro Blueline). Then, we had a bunch of eclectic styles. We took the most idiosyncratic examples that would still work as typefaces: one detailed “pixel” based lettering (KTF Metro Sport) and one made of tiles, taking in account the whole station space (KTF Metro Xarkiv). These were letters interpreting the ancient Rus in a very modern way. We also couldn’t leave out (KTF Metro Botanical).

INT:Can you tell us a bit about the process of making these experiments into working typefaces?

YA: We had no Latin models, so we had to figure it out. We started with Cyrillic sources, which is always fun, as this goes against the usual track of “Cyrillization” in western fonts. These were long winter evenings working with a few students who stayed with us to finish them. We had to do outline streamlining, glyph set expansion, and taking care of accent consistency so the fonts work well in multilingual environments – our usual routines. I guess our students learned a lot. We did this all voluntarily.

NT: What did you uncover in your research and revival of the Kyiv subway system lettering, about the history of the city?

YA: The project opens up the topic of typefaces made by non type designers. These materials are interesting because they bring different optics and angles when looking at letterforms. Our metro consultant found a bunch of letters in the form of technical drawings made by architects, mainly as a by-product of the station design project. These were very curious, as they are meticulously measured and described in that typometry manner of the Renaissance. In these, you can feel the level of care each letterform was provided. We have yet to show many of them to the public. I also want to do an exhibition about it.

The brass letters of Red Line (KMF Metro Roman) were supposedly precast and reused for station renaming. In the nineties, when Ukraine became independent, casting was discontinued, and officials had to puzzle new names together from leftovers. At Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) station, you’d have a strange letter ‘Zhe’, made from two ‘Es’ and an ‘I’. We included this weird letter as a stylistic alternative.

During the project, I had an opportunity to talk to an architect, who was initially very suspicious about my call. Once he realised I was not a yellow press journalist but a type enthusiast, he began a big monologue about the “right calligraphic logic” and how lousy station letters nowadays look. From that call, I understood how dedicated he was to details; station lettering was seen as part of the architecture. It sounds obvious to us nowadays, but in Soviet times, one had to consistently fight with bureaucrats and officials to produce the idea. He designed the most remarkable letters for my personal view, but he said he doesn’t like them anymore.

INT: Why do you think typography is a great tool or vessel to preserve the history of a place? What do you hope to preserve in this project?

YA:Kyiv metro is like a museum, a time capsule. It represents the evolution of typography. Through typographic changes, we can trace the development of ideologies over time. As the station letters change and get dismantled, we preserve the city’s memory both in digital form and in our virtual museum and the typefaces we distribute. By making fonts, we ‘revive’ dead matter – it goes beyond preservation and lives on through new designs they’ve been used in.

INT:How have the fonts been put into use since their release? Have they made an appearance in any interesting projects?

YA: They’ve been used by many of our friends. For example, a T-shirt series about bas-reliefs on historical buildings by Looch Studio; a short movie by Andriy Smirnov Luis Jansen; in a fan-fiction magazine Danke designed by Emmanuel Crivelli; and a book cover by Atelier Dyakova.

KTF's Kyiv Metro Fonts are free for Ukrainians. For the rest of the world, whilst Ukraine is in a state of emergency, the foundry are taking donations to distribute to those in need.