Medium

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*.

Christian Schwartz, a type designer and one of the founders of the type foundry Commercial Type, lives and works in New York. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., he worked for a time at MetaDesign in Berlin. After returning to the United States, he worked at type studio Font Bureau, going independent in 2001. In 2007, he and London designer Paul Barnes founded Commercial Type. The studio’s projects include typefaces for The Guardian, Esquire, T (The New York Times Style Magazine), the Empire State Building and Sprint. Also in 2007 Schwartz was awarded the prestigious Prix Charles Peignot, given to designers under 35 years of age for “outstanding contributions to type design.” He has been on the short list of the Museum of Design, in London, as Designer of the Year and was rated among the top 40 most influential designers under 40 years of age by Wallpaper* and on Time’s list of top 100 designers.

Typefaces by Christian Schwartz: FF Bau, Farnham, Graphik, Guardian, Neue Haas Grotesk, Kommissar, Neutraface, Produkt, Stag

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.

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.

Vincent Chan is a type designer and teacher. He studied graphic design at Australia’s Monash University in Melbourne, from which he has an advanced degree. In 2012–2014, he worked as a type designer for Commercial Type in New York. Currently, he teaches design at Monash University Faculty of Art Design & Architecture.

Berton Hasebe(born 1982) moved from Hawaii to study and work in Los Angeles, obtaining a BA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2005. In 2007 he moved to the Netherlands to study type design through the Type and Media Masters course at The Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (KABK). His typeface Alda, designed while attending Type and Media, was awarded the 2008 judges pick from the Type Directors Club in New York. In the same year Alda was also selected by the Tokyo Type Directors Club to be included in its annual publication. Berton has resided in New York since 2008, and he was a staff designer with Commercial Type from 2008 to 2013, when he left to start his own studio. Typefaces by Berton Hasebe: Alda, Druk, Portrait Platform, Styrene.

Ilya Ruderman and Yury Ostromentsky (CSTM Fonts)

They are both graphic and type designers. Founders of CSTM Fonts (2014) type foundry and a new font distributor type.today (2016).

Graduated from Moscow State University of Print (Graphic Design Department), where they took Alexander Tarbeev’s classes. Later Ilya Ruderman graduated from Type & Media (Royal Academy of Art), the Hague, the Netherlands. After graduation he was a tutor of Type&Typography course at British Higher School of Art and Design, Moscow (2008-2015), was an art-director of information agency RIA Novosti. He is an author of cyrillic versions of such typeface as Lava, Graphik, Neutraface and others, that was made for such studios as Typotheque, Commercial Type, Typonine and House Industries. He is an author of: Permian typeface, Big City Grotesque and several other corporate typefaces.

Before 2013 Yury Ostromentsky worked mostly as an editorial designer and art-director of BigCity Magazine, where he used his personal lettering, that was the base of the Pilar typeface, released by CSTM Fonts last year. He is an author of several book series designs and logotypes.

Both typefaces of Ilya Ruderman and Yury Ostromentsky were the winners of such type design competitions as Modern Cyrillic 2009, Modern Cyrillic 2014, Granshan 2011, European Design Award 2012. Kazimir typeface and Tele2 Typefamily, the CSTM Fonts’s latest releases, were among the winners of Granshan 2015.