Awarded by the Morisawa Type Competition and a bunch of other international chairs celebrating design, Dmytro has been developing fonts for 20 years. A self-thought designer and type aficionado since early childhood, he is the modern Ukrainian typography godfather. In his uni years, Dmytro lived fully the Sumy newspaper life, with jobs from courier to advertising agent, cartoonist, editor, makeup-man, designer, web-designer and art-director. Along the way, he has been creating types and kept doing so even after the newspaper was gone. Dmytro collaborates nowadays with the first-rate Ukrainian creative agencies, government organizations and international companies.
ADVICE FOR INTERNATIONAL HEADHUNTERS, RELATED TO UKRAINIAN CREATIVES
Although Ukrainians are similar to other Eastern European nations, still people differ inside any society. At Upwork, where sometimes I get the orders from abroad, all the feedback comments from my clients are positive. I try not to promise if I am not sure that I will do it. If I did promise, I keep my word. If there is a possibility, I perform more/better than it was agreed. I meet the deadlines as well.
Ukraine is fighting war. Many of our creative and business projects are put on hold. So my colleagues and I are open to the orders from abroad and international projects.
A SAMPLE OF YOUR BEST WORK
Among the works which represent me as a type designer, let’s point out the popular ones and the works which got high professional assessment: KyivType, a variable type superfamily containing three subfamilies: Sans, Serif and Titling (with traditionally Ukrainian semi-serifs).
KyivType has been developing for non-official (grassroots initiative) identity of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine #newkyivlogo, at the initiative of Online Institute Projector, Bulanov Büro, Banda Agency.
Still for a long time, it’s overstepped the borders and is gaining ever more popularity in Ukraine. Not only in Ukraine actually. It’s really getting downloaded a lot.
I am on the lookout for the designs/pictures with my types in use and post them on my social media under tag #dr_types. The followers are used to sending me such examples. These are the ones with KyivType the most frequently, I can say.
I could explain the popularity of the type by its affordability – the type is free, versatility – a lot of typefaces, wide variability range, “Ukrainianness” – the type got some features characteristic to the Ukrainian typographic school, which is of high relevance under the conditions of war and self-identity accent).
“Half of the Ukrainian graphic designers are already used to choose KyivType presenting Ukraine abroad, making posters, banners, identities for cultural forums, exhibitions, and fests because it has bright Ukrainian genetic code”, commented Jaroslaw Belinski, graphic designer & public figure.
E-UKRAINE, THE TYPE FAMILY FOR UKRAINIAN GOVERNMENT SERVICES
In 2019 the new team of the new President decided to face reforms. They chose the digitalization of Ukraine, the transition to the online way of citizens-state communication as one of the main reformation directions. The service “Diia” (the application, web-portal and digital country brand) has been created with the cooperation of the Ministry of Digital Transformation, Fedoriv Marketing, Innovations Agency & Spiilka Design Buro. It has two groups of typefaces. The first one provides for the neutral typesetting; it got more widely spread graphemes of letters with higher readability. The second group (e-Ukraine Head) with its expressive Ukrainianness provides for the display typesetting.
The type is free for use by the government structures and for any other non-commercial charitable purposes. You can download e-Ukraine here.
DR KRUK – HEADLINE SERIF TYPEFACE, AWARDED AT MORISAWA TYPE DESIGN COMPETITION
The type awarded in 2019, at the Morisawa Type Design Competition, supports many languages based on the Latin, Cyrrilic and Greek scripts. It has so many alternatives, ligatures, opentype-twists for text mode fine-tuning and kickass typesetting.
It’s really nice that at the International Type Design Competition in Tokyo the professional jury assessed this project in the category “Latin Types”.
“The name is accordant with the Ukrainian words kruk (raven) and kriuk (hook). The type is of hard forms featuring sharp edges. The esthetics recalls the glorious knightly epoch. The broken swords, hooks, arrowheads, bricks of the destroyed ramparts got stuck in the typography wilds”, that’s how I described this project sending it to competition to Japan.
You can buy/rent the type at American MyFonts or Ukrainian Rentafonts.
Kruk is used for the display type set at Telegraf.Design, the first Ukrainian print magazine about design, created at the Alexander Tregub’s initiative. By the way, I heard the second issue is already getting edited. We are waiting for.
A CHILDHOOD STORY THAT ANNOUNCED THE CREATIVE PERSON YOU ARE TODAY
I used to pay attention to types since I learnt to read. I was interested in the construction of letters, some small details that differed technically the same letters in the different types.
Ok, if there should be a story, here it is. One day I visited my aunt who just started laundry. The washing-machine was called “Riga-8”. There was quite an unusual kickass “g”. It mesmerized me. I just sat in front of the machine and was looking at the sign for a long time. Half an hour, maybe the whole hour – till the machine was ticking (it had the mechanic timer). I deepened in a kind of nirvana or prostration while observing. To cut a long story short, from that day “g” has been one of my favorite letters.
A UKRAINIAN CUSTOM REFLECTING THE BEAUTY OF YOUR CULTURE
Village Wedding. Lots of food and drinks, the traditional Ukrainian rituals and songs, dances, fun of all kinds. The imperial russification and the abolishment of the Ukrainian traditions mostly raged in the big industrial cities. So in search of the local spirit it is better to go to the villages. In Ukrainian the word “wedding” and “fun” have the same stem. Unfortunately, Ukraine is getting through the war now so we are not up for fun really.
UKRAINE SHOULD BE KNOWN FOR
Ukraine used to be a part of Europe from the earliest times, long before Ukraine had close economic and political relations with the West. Now once again, the Ukrainians are fighting the war against the bloody ruscist occupational horde which aspires to enslave and destroy Ukraine.