• Pavel Lozovsky
• Designer

BlogoSphere is a production center that helps brands integrate into content of popular YouTube bloggers, such as Ksenia Sobchak, Alexey Pivovarov, Nikolay Solodovnikov.

When I joined the company, it had neither a website nor an identity, only a violet logotype which nobody enjoyed stylistically. The website was supposed to become a key communication tool, therefore it was only logical to start working on style from it, and I didn’t use the logo as a reference.

For some reason, I associated bloggers and video content with a TV caption card: multicolour geometric shapes, static and glitches. But this image turned out to be difficult to adapt, while the idea of static turned out to be right for the task. I drew several patterns-glitches and came up with a mini system: divided bloggers into groups and created their own pattern for each of them. Sport — diagonal lightnings, reportages — horizontal rippling, humour — vertical waves. This division is not striking and doesn’t stand out, most people don’t notice it, — but that was intentional.

To combine with those glitches, I was looking for a typeface with particular, distinctive, catchy forms, and my first sketches of the site were set in Druk. However, in autumn 2019 Druk was already used everywhere, and, frankly, I didn’t feel like doing yet another project with this typeface. It also needed a pair for lowercase setting, and I haven’t been able to find it. Then at some point I saw Halvar Breitschrift that has just been released. I looked at it and realised that this was our vibe, a certain ironic-technological one. Plus, Halvar was fitted with thin styles that fit well for text blocks, which made a second typeface unnecessary. And in addition to slanted styles, Halvar also had super-slanted styles, I’ve never seen something like that before. Too bad that those haven’t made it to the final project.

Having finished working on the website, I took an old violet logo, re-set its text part in Halvar, and slightly refined the form of the glyph. No one seemed to mind.

Halvar is a typeface of German studio TypeMates equipped with an extended stylistic range. 81 styles of Halvar are three families: wide Breitschrift, regular Mittelschrift, narrow Engschrift. Thanks to its extended Latin and Cyrillic sets, Halvar supports more than 190 languages and is perfect for multilingual interfaces or branding.

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