Ukraine has its own font now

Finally there is positive news. Every opportunity to make a good statement about ourselves is precious. One of the respectable trademarks that can represent Ukraine in the world of modern information technologies, can be a font. Such apparently simple things as fonts can really tell a lot about us.

The results of the national open contest “Ukrainian Font,” which started on June 1 this year, were announced at the Mystetsky Arsenal on Wednesday, November 30. Professional unions, companies, and individual designers participated in it. The organizers of the contest say that it was the first large-scale, well-organized event that allowed for creating a modern Ukrainian business font of the highest level. This, in its turn, will open possibilities of its promoting and wide use in Ukraine and abroad.

“Ukraine has a good tradition of graphic art and printing,” says the Mystetsky Arsenal board member, initiator of the “Ukrainian Font” contest Mykhailo ILKO. “Ukraine has a long history of interesting type fami-lies, important for the whole calligraphic culture. But they are unknown to the public and have a very limited scope of use in everyday life of modern Ukrainian society. This is the main problem that the contest has to solve. We have received beautiful fonts from our participants. Frankly speaking, we were lost at first, because we had not expected so many wonderful fonts. So it took us a long while to choose the winner.”

The idea to hold a contest like this occurred to Ilko five years ago. According to him, the main goal of the contest is not just the creating of a new font, but giving this font a possibility to be widely used.

Designer Andrii Shevchenko from Berdiansk became the winner of the contest. A new full electronic type family will be created for the font designed by him, and it soon will be uploaded to the “Ukrainian font” website. It will be available for downloading and installing for everyday use.

“It is a chance to advertise oneself. And such chances are pretty rare in our country,” says designer and the winner of the contest “Ukrainian Font” Andrii SHEVCHENKO. “I submitted three fonts to the contest: two of them were my own and one was created in a joint authorship. You know, the competition was quite tough at the contest. I think that the main achievement of the contest is that it has put tens of fonts in the limelight! They will catch someone’s attention, they might get noticed and really rouse someone’s interest. And this is extremely important. And, of course, I hope that soon everyone will have a chance to download this finished product and use such quality tool on a daily basis.”

TO THE POINT

On that very same day Mystetsky Arsenal presented a new social Internet project called “Let’s create Mystetsky Arsenal together!” This project emerged due to public initiative, and it suggests making a financial contribution to developing Mystetsky Arsenal. The main idea is that every caring individual will join the process of art culture development in Ukraine.

The mechanism of the Internet project is very simple: anyone can register at art-arsenalfund.org and choose one of the bricks in the front wall of Arsenal. The shot was made from the Lavra belfry. Overall 32,000 participants from around the world will sign their names on this virtual wall. Besides, a name of companies or organizations can be written on the wall, and adjacent bricks can be united into groups. All participants will have a chance to win tickets online to the best museums of the world: the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Prado Museum, the Dresden Picture Gallery, and the National Museum in Warsaw. Five “lucky” bricks with the tickets are already hidden on this virtual wall.