I can’t resist commenting on this year’s ATypI. On the one hand, I appreciate the gesture: two full conferences, wider geography, and (at least in theory) more room for non-Latin scripts and communities.

On the other hand, I can’t unsee the colonial trope in how this "bridge" is framed: "innovation, infrastructure, and the future of the field" are positioned in the Western center (Stanford), while "culture, tradition, and voices" are neatly relocated to an exoticized periphery (Sharjah).

I’d even respect an honest disclaimer like: political reality of USA forces us to split the event. But the "double the fun" tone reads as tone-deaf — a privilege-coded PR gloss that ignores asymmetric access to. I mean… are you welcomed if you don’t hold a privileged passport?

Good to see a master’s project centered on Ukrainian type design presented in UAP (Poznań).

Lumyo is described as a text typeface family shaped by Ukrainian authenticity. What matters here is not “local flavor” as decoration, but an attempt to think through Ukrainian Cyrillic as a design problem, a historical layer, and a living graphic tradition with its own logic and references.

Congrats to Anna Pohorielova.

#Typography #TypeDesign #Cyrillic #UkrainianDesign

When designing multilingual systems, what becomes the default? Whose language serves as the sample? Whose history shapes the narrative?

“Erasure by Default” describes cases where one dominant example stands in for the whole.
The MyFonts post on Cyrillic is a clear example: a script used by over 50 languages is framed solely through a russian lens. A shared typographic ecology is reduced to an imperial norm, even though Cyrillic also lives in Ukrainian, Bulgarian, or many Central Asian languages (which were forced into it under russification policies).

Power operates through defaults, metadata, and taxonomy. It’s not merely exclusion but deciding who gets to represent the many.
#Typography #Cyrillic #DecolonizeDesign #ErasureByDefault #TypeDesign #DesignPolitics