Lady Omega

Another Christmas/New Year’s post - I really love Notcot, it’s a site which always has the coolest stuff on the web as to all kinds of design arts. Thanks to Notcot, i found this great blog of Rob Sheridan, an LA based designer- one of the best blog designs i have seen so far and awesome works of the artist. Here’s a super cute Xmas card:

And another supercute thing i found on Notcot - made by Sleep Sheep and Friends or Cloud B ~ this turtle is cuddly under its shell, lights up in various colors, and projects the night sky on to the ceiling (or your tent, fort, etc). It’s supposed to be for toddlers but i want this thing!

Recently i’ve been faced with a problem (and this was not for the first time) - I am working on a site which is in Russian. Naturally, as any designer, i always try to make it look as pretty as i can (or as much as the client lets me ).

At the stage of making the text-logo for the site, I found out that there are NO decent web 2.0 fonts for Cyrillic languages. While my fonts folder is stuffed with all kinds of web 2.0 fonts , there are none that work with Cyrillic. I surely have some “fancy” Cyrillic fonts, but they are very specific to a certain style, and do not go with the modern designs almost at all.

Therefore, I did some research on the Russian web 2.0 business and was pretty disappointed with the results. I found out that web 2.0 does exist in Russia, and, undoubtedly, there are many talented designers and various web 2.0 applications, but I haven’t found any decent information, samples or sources for the web 2.0 or any modern-looking Cyrillic fonts. This was the only link i found and it speaks for itself.

Russian designers’ personal sites are mostly in English, which is a necessity, of course. The sites in Russian that I saw, stick to Arial/Verdana or other default windows fonts for Cyrillic. That is very sad, I mean, while designing a website in Russian, does one have no other choices except for sticking to Arial or spending time on creating custom made letters?? Branding, logo, tag line for the site are always important, and, with having no resources to provide a decent looking text-logo or static image with text, this becomes a real pain.

So c’mon Russian fontographers, what’s going on here? Maybe I was looking in the wrong places for the fonts? If so, I would really appreciate some info on Cyrillic web 2.0 fonts.