Over the past nine-plus months, we barely wrote on our social media. When the initial shock turned into permanent stress, our team members started trying to find ways to fight it — each in their own way. Some of us find comfort in art and sports, while others keep busy with routine tasks and their kids; there are those who cope by providing targeted aid, and those who get by taking pills and doomscrolling the news. And then there is one more thing which turned out to be helpful, making us ‘stay afloat’: our profession. Or rather, the part of it that works without reflection: our craft.

We found ourselves keeping, to the best of our ability, doing our job: we design, explore, find and sell typefaces. We closely monitor any works with our fonts and feature those that we liked on our website. Together with Type Mates, we released three typefaces, now working on new ones. We dare to assume that if it comforts us a bit, it could perhaps support someone else, too. We decided to break the silence and start sharing our work with you. Not to the full extent, not as much as before, but we are going to somehow capture what we achieve. We are planning to focus on practiсe: add new things to our manual, talk about our own typefaces, investigate and reveal some technical details. Timur Zima is ready to look around and collect all things valuable on tomorrow’s Instagram According to the new law, we are required to indicate that Facebook and Instagram are products of Meta, an organization recognized as extremist in the Russian Federation, again.

Type design won’t stop the ongoing nightmare. Beauty won’t save the world. But if designing letters or looking at letters will eventually help someone escape the state of total despair, it can be a tiny step on the way from destruction to construction. What else is making us feel a little better — it’s knowing that many aid projects in different countries use typefaces from our library, which means the results of our work help deliver the important messages to more people. Type helps help.

If you believe that the distribution of black and white space seems an inappropriate thing to discuss right now, feel free to mute our account. But if finding a balance on screen might help you figure out a certain white and black balance in the reality around you — we’ll be happy to help.