KYIV TYPE

Typography and Graphic Design - Visual Treasures from Kyiv

KYIV TYPE is a bachelor's thesis exploring the design scene in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. The book strikes a middle path between a typical coffee table book, an emotional portrait of the city and its inhabitants, and a specialist design publication.

The book's content can essentially be reduced to three areas:

1. Visual — These parts of the book contain the collection of design and typography finds that the author gathered and documented during his stays in Ukraine's capital. They provide an overview of the kinds of design encountered on a trip through present-day Kyiv — in public space, on posters, postcards, print publications and more.

2. Context — In order to view and situate the presented works, some of them historical, in an appropriate frame, the book offers an overview of the history of Kyiv, the Ukrainian language, and the emotional perspective of the city's residents. For this, both designers and ordinary citizens — old and young, poor and rich — were given a voice.

3. Field-specific — As a third focus, KYIV TYPE also engages with type design, typography and design from and around Kyiv on a professional level. Type designers and graphic designers present their work exclusively for KYIV TYPE and report in detail on their working processes. The development of Cyrillic character sets is also examined and contrasted with the Latin character system most readers will be familiar with. A particular focus lies on how Cyrillic languages are handled in type design and how multi-language type design can shift once Latin is no longer assumed as the default. A dedicated typeface system was designed to illustrate this, drawing on various historically relevant examples.

All content in the book has been prepared to be easily understood by non-specialists, requiring no prior knowledge. The individual chapters benefit from one another but don't depend on each other, allowing readers to enter at any chapter. Kyiv is a sprawling, green and open city that also carries a certain weight. The open, printed spine, the large, almost unwieldy format, the coloring and the open tactility of the papers all help convey this feeling.

KYIV TYPE is printed climate-neutrally on FSC-certified papers and designed so that it can be printed digitally, virtually without waste and cost-effectively, on standard oversized A3 sheets. All original texts have also been reproduced unchanged in their original language, Russian or Ukrainian. To ensure accessibility for an international audience, all accompanying texts are written in English.

65 EUR