Events
Cyrillic — Writing System for Over 120 Different Languages
with Ilya Ruderman
Explore the multicultural world of Cyrillic with a 20-year veteran of the script.
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Join Ilya Ruderman for a deep dive into the rich and multifaceted world of the Cyrillic script — a writing system used across more than 120 languages, from Eastern Europe to Central Asia and beyond.
This talk will explore the origins of Cyrillic, its historical evolution, and the cultural and political forces that shaped its development. Ilya will highlight what makes Cyrillic graphically unique — from its structural contrasts with Latin to the challenges and opportunities it presents to type designers today.
Beyond the core letterforms, the talk will shed light on the diversity within Cyrillic itself: the subtle and not-so-subtle differences in typographic traditions across Slavic, Turkic, Uralic, and Caucasian languages. Whether you’re a designer, linguist, or just curious about global scripts, you’ll come away with a deeper appreciation of Cyrillic’s complexity — and its modern relevance in type and design.
Ilya Ruderman
Ilya Ruderman is a type and graphic designer and teacher who lives and works in Barcelona. He is a graduate of the Moscow State University of the Printing Arts (2002), where his graduation project was done under the supervision of Alexander Tarbeev. He has a MA degree in type design from the Type & Media program at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (2005). After completing the program, he returned to Moscow, where he has collaborated for a number of publications: Kommersant, Afisha, Moskovskiye Novosti, Bolshoi Gorod and Men’s Health Russia. In 2005–2007 he was art director for Afisha’s city guidebooks, following which he was art director for RIA-Novosti, a news agency, for several years. In 2007–2015 he supervised the curriculum in type and typography at the British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow. He has been very active as a consultant on Cyrillic since 2008. In 2014 he founded CSTM Fonts with Yury Ostromentsky.
