Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Eugene Sadko

The Ukrainian font market could hardly be called large, but we have quite a few talented and original type designers. They design both commercial and free fonts, including freely available fonts for Ukrainian cities. Meanwhile, Rentafont, being a font service originating in Ukraine, supports development of the local typographic culture and promotes such fonts.

At the close of 2017, our service was the first to start disseminating a new typeface for Lutsk. It was a pleasant surprise that not only designers but also common citizens took interest in the new typeface. Therefore, to support the Ukrainians’ interest in typography, we have decided to build a full collection of Ukrainian local fonts.

The stories behind the creation of city typefaces are quite diverse. In some cases these are works submitted for competition, in others, it is purely their authors’ initiative. These include the “workhorses” for city way-finding and display fonts for tourism brands.

Ready to Use Typefaces for Ukrainian Cities

1. Lutsk Type Free Display Font

Lutsk is one of the most ancient cities of Ukraine. The city is one of the largest in the Western Ukraine. Lutsk Type perfectly combines archaic and modernistic feeling. Lutsk Type is an all caps typeface and was designed as a display font, it can be used in many ways. This font works perfectly in book covers, greeting cards, invitations, weddings, posters, magazines, fashion world, logos, packagings, letterpress,etc The typeface was designed by Kyrylo Tkachov in 2017.

Download Font Lutsk Type Free

2. Mariupol Free Way-finding Typeface

Mariupol is a geometric sans, inspired, on the one hand, by Swiss and German poster graphics, on the other hand by modern technological typefaces like San Francisco, Graphik, Walsheim. Available in three basic styles: Regular, Medium and Bold. Typeface also includes a special font style with icons (Symbols). Ukrainian, English, Greek, Russian languages are supported. Now the font is officially presented in the city wayfinding of Mariupol, it can be seen on trams and boards with the mayor’s greetings. Moreover, anyone can download this font and independently write something mariupolish. The font was designed by Andrij Shevchenko and Sergiy Rodionov in 2017.

Download Font Mariupol Free

3. Proba Pro Multifunctional Typeface

This typeface was the basis for Proba Nav — a special version for city way-finding in Kyiv. Proba Nav currently is not a public font, but you can use it’s original — Proba Pro. This is a geometric sans with lowered x-height, prominent ascenders and descenders and a subtle humanist touch. It comes in 7 weights + matching italics each supporting numerous Latin-based languages as well as major Cyrillic languages. It is packed with OpenType features like ligatures, small caps, 4 sets of digits, 2 stylistic sets, superiors and inferiors, fractions, ordinals, and respective punctuation varieties including all-cap punctuation. There are also language-specific alternates for Romanian Ș/ș, Catalan punt volat, and correct small-cap versions for i/ı in Turk languages. Proba Pro was designed and released by Andriy Konstantynov in Mint Type foundry in 2014.

Rent Typeface Proba Pro

4. Old Kharkiv Display Font

Old Kharkiv was inspired by the first half of the 20th century photo with a signage on the building of the Ivan Kotlyarevsky Kharkiv National University of Arts. During the design, the font has acquired unique features not from the original signage, for example, drops in uppercase were replaced with sharp serifs. This font contains the letters of all the main European languages, Cyrillic and special characters. Some uppercase letters (where allowed their form) have decorative elements (swashes) to use them as drop caps or initials. There are stylistic alternatives for some Ukrainian letters (Щ, Ц, Л, С, Ж). Also, as a bonus, this font contains up to a dozen graphic elements that you can use in your layout. The font was designed by Bohdan Hdal in 2016–2017.

Rent Font Old Kharkiv

5. Lugatype Free Display Font

Lugatype is the unique slab serif font with narrow proportions. It has strong masculine Ukrainian style. This typeface will be the best solution for posters, signage, magazine, product branding, corporate branding, logos and titles. Lugatype was designed by Kyrylo Tkachov in 2014.

Download Font Lugatype Free

Other City Fonts

There are also way-finding font for Lviv (Petro Nahirnyi), touristic typeface for Sumy (Dmytro Rastvortsev), original city typeface for Dnipro (Kyrylo Tkachov, Andrii Shevchenko), typefaces for Dnipro and Kyiv (Viktor Kharyk), and way-finding typeface for Kharkiv (Andrii Shevchenko). Some fonts are still work in progress, while some are almost completed and will soon join the Rentafont collection.

Our ambition for 2018 is to bring together at Rentafont all the modern typefaces for tourism brands and way-finding of Ukrainian cities.

Useful Font Collections

Fonts for Ukrainian cities (five font families)
Fonts with Ukrainian personality (30+ desktop and Web fonts)
Fonts by Ukrainian type designers (360+ desktop and Web fonts)
Fonts for city way-finding (280+ desktop and Web fonts)
Text typefaces or “workhorses” (40+ font families)
Bonus — 70 font collections for all occasions.

Typefaces for Ukrainian Cities on Rentafont was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Typefaces for Ukrainian Cities on Rentafont

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