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. After completing the program, he returned to Moscow, where he has collaborated for a number of media: Kommersant, Afisha, Moskovskiye Novosti, Bolshoi Gorod and Men’s Health Russia. He has a MA degree in type design from the Type & Media program at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (2005). 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. Ilya is a type and graphic designer and teacher, lives and works in Barcelona. The Cyrillic extension was drawn by Ilya Ruderman (CSTM Fonts) in 2015. The typeface is available in nine weights, with italics, each with five sets of figures. By the way, the web-site of type.today is set in Graphik. It is suitable for display purposes as well as for text sizes, captions and for such specific tasks as navigation systems and map-making. The low contrast and large x-height give the typeface great versatility. The heavy end of the family is inspired in part by Paul Renner’s Plak, a relatively obscure display typeface cut only in large sizes.įirst drawn as the house style for Schwartzco Inc., it was further developed for Condé Nast Portfolio and later for Wallpaper* and T, the New York Times Style Magazine. These influences included Neuzeit Grotesk, Folio, Recta, and Maxima.
The lighter weights were influenced by the less popular sans serifs that many European foundries released to compete with Futura, Helvetica and Univers, the juggernauts of 20th century sans serifs. Graphik was inspired by the appealing plainness seen in many of the less common 20th century European sans serifs and in the hand-lettering of classic Swiss Modern posters.