• Philipp Tretyakov
• Partner and art director with ESH Gruppa

’48 Hours Novosibirsk’ is two days of cultural events, ranging from an opportunity to visit someone’s artistic atelier to vernissages and actions. Today, 48 Hours is effectively the best project to support local artists, and that is what inspires us the most in our work on it.

48 Hours Novosibirsk is a fest about the brutal and cold city, a stereotypical image of which is important to reconsider and redefine. And in this perspective, technical Halvar, on the one hand, reminds of urban context, and on the other, — by its delicacy and attractiveness, — refers to openness and transparency.

48 Hours Novosibirsk is an institutional initiative, hence its clean, clear communication, while its approach to typography inherits from the principle that is behind the design of most cultural platforms in the world: lots of white space, focus on typography, clear hierarchy of information. That is simple, yet important: Novosibirsk now offers no cultural context (natural for citizens of our capitals), which means it needs to be created.

Halvar is a sans serif typeface with a brutal engineer-ish charm and a wide stylistic spectrum. 81 styles of Halvar are brought into three families: wide Breitschrift, regular Mittelschrift, narrow Engschrift. Due to its extended Latin and Cyrilic case, Halvar supports more than 190 languages and works great for multi-language interfaces or branding.

Author of Halvar is the German studio TypeMates, founded by Jakob Runge, Lisa Fischbach and Nils Thomsen. Other than Halvar, TypeMates released collections Cera and Norbert which are both available on type.today.

Project team:
Designers: Maria Dulova, Roman Sazonov, Alena Melnikova
Art directors: Violetta Postnova, Philip Tretyakov
Manager: Ivan Matskevich