Notes

New: Forma DJR Cyrillic by Jovana Jocić

I am excited to announce Forma DJR Cyrillic, designed by Serbia-based designer Jovana Jocić.

Forma DJR is a revival of Aldo Novarese’s slick neo-grotesque. Working together with Roger Black and Indra Kupferschmid, I studied the original metal type and interpreted the design as a large family with optical sizes, rounded corners, and tapering stems.

Jovana picked up where we left off and took care in translating this design to the Cyrillic script. The design is thoroughly modern, but never severely so. It maintains the simplicity and warmth of Nebiolo’s original design with its single-story a, and echoes them in the softly-draping curves of Д and Л and the simplified form of K and Ж (it’s not the same as the Latin K!) .

Jovana’s expansion adds several languages to Forma’s repertoire, going beyond the Russian alphabet and including localized forms for Bulgarian, Serbian, not to mention a ligature to handle Ukranian’s tricky ЇЇ pair.

And, perhaps most impressively of all, Jovana found a way to harmonize the design with Forma’s super-tight spacing. I found this to be tricky enough in the Latin, but Cyrillic has more straight-sided characters than Latin (which let in very little negative space) and more overhanging characters that (which let in a ton of whitespace). I think Jovana did a great job balancing these out!

Forma DJR now supports Cyrillic in its core weights between Extra Light and Bold (300–700) in all of its optical sizes. A variable font covering that range is included in the family pack as well!

Since the Italics and extreme weights are not done yet, I am keeping the Forma DJR Cyrillic family separate (for now) in order to avoid confusion. But if you’ve already purchased a license for Forma DJR’s Latin and would like to use the Cyrillic, you can contact me to upgrade to the Cyrillic at no additional charge.

To see more, feel free to check out Forma Cyrillic’s web page, grab the PDF specimen Jovana designed, and take the fonts for a spin. We are excited to see what you do with the fonts!