Ukraine has had enough of Russian fonts.
Amid the country’s invasion by Russia, Ukrainians will no longer have to read any official documents set in a Russian typeface after a just-unveiled typeface goes into full effect. The new national font is called Zakon, “law” in Ukrainian.
Designers, military personnel, and Ukrainian citizens have for years called for their country to swap out Russian-designed Cyrillic fonts like Izhitsa, which appears on official documents, certificates, awards, diplomas, battle flags, and plaques, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture. Though the Russian font and others are widely used in Ukraine, they’re designed by the Russian type foundry ParaType, which Ukraine’s ministry says cooperates with Russian authorities.
To change that, Ukraine’s government and the country’s largest online jobs board partnered to hire a team of Ukrainian type designers to make something imbued with the country’s typographic heritage. A beta version of the font became available on October 29, and after a feedback period, a refined, expanded version is expected to be released early next year and will appear on official Ukrainian documents.
Ukraine’s parliament adopted a resolution in January to create the country’s own national typeface, saying that it would address the legacy of Russian cultural influence from when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.
A team of four Ukrainian type designers designed Zakon, which was unveiled last month in Cyrillic and Latin characters. The designers are Oleksiy Chekal, who designed lettering for the Orthodox Church of Ukraine; the typographic and type designer Hennadiy Zarechniuk; Dmytro Rastvortsev, who designed fonts including UAF Sans, for the Ukrainian military; and Andrij Shevchenko, a former winner of Ukraine’s modern business font competition.
Zakon is a serif typeface that features elements distinct to Ukrainian typography, like flared, asymmetrical serifs and diamond tittles that dot letters like I or Yi, a Cyrillic letter unique to Ukrainian. Its proportions resemble those of classical Roman typefaces, placing Ukrainian type within the wider European tradition. The type family’s letterform was inspired by the work of six Ukrainian artists, including Vasyl Krychevsky, who designed Ukraine’s 1918 trident coat of arms and banknotes.