Peter T. Daniels wrote, re. Cyrillic:

>More than that, even, there's the paucity of descenders and ascenders,
>and the monotonous pair of serifs above and below like trolley tracks.
>There was lots of experimentation with Cyrillic typography in the early
>days of the Revolution, and probably with calligraphy as well, but we
>all know what happened to experimental arts there soon after.

There's still quite a lot of experimentation with Cyrillic typography and
lettering happening in Russia, but the devcelopment of decent text faces
has been a priority since the relatively late introduction of digital font
technology. See Maxim Zhukov's 'open letter' on Soviet and post-Soviet
typography in the first issue of the ATypI journal, _Type_.

In my work designing Cyrillic typefaces, I have found that -- due in large
part to the characteristics Peter Daniels mentions -- relative proportion
and visual weight of letters is much more important to readability than in
the Latin script. The differentiation of forms in the Latin script is broad
enough (although some people argue that it should be broader) to enable
word shapes to be recognised even when the letters themselves have
inconsistent weights and widths. This is not to suggest at all that
proportion is not important to readability in the Latin script but, that
because the Cyrillic forms are less diverse and less well differentiated,
this aspect of Cyrillic type design is vital to producing comfortably
readable typefaces. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be widely
recognised or practised, even by some Russian type designers, let alone by
Western designers approaching Cyrillic for the first time. I have been
fortunate to have had all my Cyrillic work reviewed by Maxim Zhukov, the UN
typographic coordinator, who has a very clear understanding of and good eye
for the necessary relative weights and widths of his native letters.

John Hudson

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