Ultra Italic

Ilya is a type and graphic designer and teacher, lives and works in Barcelona. He is a graduate of the Moscow State University of the Printing Arts (2002), where his graduation project was done under the supervision of Alexander Tarbeev. He has a MA degree in type design from the Type & Media program at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (2005). After completing the program, he returned to Moscow, where he has collaborated for a number of media: Kommersant, Afisha, Moskovskiye Novosti, Bolshoi Gorod and Men’s Health Russia. In 2005-2007 he was art director for Afisha’s city guidebooks, following which he was art director for RIA-Novosti, a news agency, for several years. In 2007–2015 he has also supervised the curriculum in type and typography at the British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow. He has been very active as a consultant on Cyrillic since 2008. In 2014 he founded CSTM Fonts with Yury Ostromentsky.

Typefaces by Ilya Ruderman: BigCity Grotesque Pro, Kazimir, Kazimir Text, Navigo, Permian (a typeface-brand for the city of Perm) and Cyrillic versions of: Austin, Dala Floda, Graphik, Marlene, Moscow Sans (as a consultant), Typonine Sans, Thema.

Based in New York and London, Commercial Type is a joint venture between Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz, who have collaborated since 2004 on various typeface projects, most notably the award winning Guardian Egyptian. The company publishes retail fonts developed by Barnes and Schwartz, their staff, and outside collaborators, and also represents the two and their team when they work together on type design projects. Following the redesign of The Guardian, the team headed by Mark Porter, including Barnes and Schwartz, was awarded the coveted Black Pencil by the D&AD. The team was also nominated for the Design Museum’s “Designer of the Year” prize. In September 2006, Barnes and Schwartz were named two of the 40 most influential designers under 40 in Wallpaper*.

Paul Barnes is a graphic designer and typographer. A graduate of Reading University, he moved to New York in the early 1990s, where he worked for Roger Black (Font Bureau). His projects in those years included the redesign of the magazines Newsweek, Esquire (US and British editions) and Foreign Affairs. In 1995 Barnes set up as an independent designer in London. With Peter Saville, he worked on a diverse array of works as identities for Givenchy; Original Modern, an undertaking that was part of the City of Manchester’s regional marketing plan, and album covers for Gay Dad, New Order and Electronic. He has worked for large corporations and publishers as a designer and consultant. These clients include The Guardian, Wallpaper*, GQ, frieze and Harper’s Bazaar. In 2004 Barnes and Christian Schwartz created the type system Guardian for The Guardian newspaper and typefaces for the Empire State Building and the Conde Nast magazine Portfolio.

In 2007 Barnes and Schwartz founded Commercial Type, which develops typefaces throughout the world. In 2006 Wallpaper* named Barnes one of the 40 most influential designers under the age of 40, and in 2007 The Guardian listed him as one of the 50 best British designers.

Typefaces by Paul Barnes: Austin, Brunel, Dala Floda, Dala Moa, Guardian, Marian.