Alpha Centauri is a documentary poem by director and playwright Alexander Plotnikov about astronauts who never travelled into space. The book addresses the lives of those in the profession who never made a single space flight or didn’t come back alive. The typography on the book’s cover, designed by Maxim Balabin, is executed through Roslindale Text by David Jonathan Ross, while additional typography (page numbers, chapter titles) is set in Elma Trio by Philipp Neumeyer.

An old-style serif, Roslindale was inspired by both the American serif type of the late 19th century and its revivals dating back to the 1970s. Roslindale collection includes three typefaces: for large, medium, and small sizes. The Cyrillic extension is authored by Jovana Jocić.

Elma is a system of two fixed-width typeface families — Elma Mono and Elma Trio. While the Mono family takes the classical monospace approach with one fixed width, the Trio works with three fixed widths to make a mockery of ‘legitimate’ proportional designs. Elma’s construction is based on a compact Neo Grotesque accented with generous spacing and a broken-curves design.