• Filipp Dzyadko
• author of the book

It was crucial for me that the book be both engaging and easy to read and interesting to look at. In most cases, it’s either one thing or the other. But we needed both — and something else on top of that. That is, we wanted to make an album people enjoy looking at, a book people like to read, plus a few surprises tucked inside. That is why a key word in all our discussions was ‘balance’.

Before getting started, I drew up a list of 19 things I wanted to achieve. Some of the items in the list contradicted each other. On the one hand, the book needed to be a space of silence — a place one can retreat to. On the other, we are dealing with the reader who’s used to rapid scrolling and consuming huge amounts of information per minute. This meant we had to be able to speak that language — brightness, density, spreads that jump out at you. Yet it had to be done in a way that wouldn’t tire the reader’s eyes or make them want to escape from this horror. The key thing was that it shouldn’t be design for the sake of design, but rather something that helps you read. It had to be the Trojan horse.

A regular textbook is the last thing you would think of when looking at our project. We intended to create a book that could be useful for schools, but at the same time wanted to avoid this ‘public service institution’ tone of voice. We have neither numbered sections nor framed rules. However, it was really important to ensure a clear hierarchy on the page. In terms of structure, we are closer to a magazine than a book.

The key word for the entire series — attention. Attention to the world and to the other. To the woods. On the visual level, this was to be felt in a somewhat magical way. I knew that Daria and Yury Daria Yarzhambek, Yury Ostromentsky. Project’s art directors mastered the art of such magic.

And there’s something else: the whole thing had to be read as one long story — it shouldn’t be an account of a journey; it had to be a journey. It was essential that the reader felt that this story was about them. About them, their life, and their destiny.

My favourite spread is the one with a triangle. It has everything. It is both a wonder and a thing which is easy to read, and a world of its own.

• Daria Yarzhambek
• art director of the project

Well, of course, those 19 items contained no mention of typefaces. But Filipp and I looked through a number of children’s encyclopaedias and got the feeling that, with a densely packed encyclopaedia, it seems extremely interesting at first, with a surprise at every page, and yet halfway through the book, it kind makes you feel kind of motion-seek.

We focused precisely on doing things so that an increased level of density wouldn’t make one feel tired, and turned to the dominant ways people consume information today — TikTok and Instagram. We realised that we want to try to make eclecticism and diversity our secret ingredients. The book deliberately avoids using a single, distinctive visual style — there’s a number of styles that interact with each other in ways that are unknown to science, much like in a print magazine from the 2010s.

Applying the TikTok/Instagram approach, we tried to split the messages into the smallest possible segments so it doesn’t feel monotonous, or feel like dealing with bricks of text. We believe our strategy worked — there’s way more information woven into the book than meets the eye.

The author’s text in the book is this dense, captivating, artfully crafted narrative. We help the reader navigate it through various inserted elements — such as the absurdist comic strip written by Yury Saprykin Jr. from the Medieval Suffering project. Choosing a typeface for this was quite easy, as type.today’s collection includes our favourite, Grato Marker.

Speech bubbles, left to right: ‘How great it is that agriculture exists!’, ‘It’s not cool that because of it there are wars, inequality…’, ‘Cavity!’, ‘I  didn’t want cavity! All I did was dig canals!’

Caption: ’This is fine’

Speech bubbles, left to right: ‘Guys, remind me: who suggested making a big ceramic wolf?’, ‘Pug’, ‘Soos!’, ‘A collective mistake = a perfect date!’

The book features a number of different voices that communicate with the reader as they progress through the text. We came up with the idea of introducing two more characters, two voices in addition to the author. The first is Paperclip Person (that’s our in-house term for the character).

Paperclip Person is kind of like your older sibling, a bit of a teasing know-it-all. They can argue with the text or add to the author’s narrative. We assigned the typeface Elma Trio to this voice.

Another character we came up with is Monocle Person; they are here to convey academic knowledge. He is like an older relative or an older friend, whose entire room is packed with old encyclopaedias. And, naturally, they’re a subscriber to Monocle and The New Yorker. That is why the typography of what they’re saying heavily plays with the visual style of the Monocle magazine — featuring all sorts of little lines, dots, circled numbers, and so on. The voice of Monocle Person is handled by Lyon.

We went through quite a journey while designing and formatting the main text — the author’s text, as we belong to some sort of sect that believes that texts set in serif typefaces are easier to read in print than those set in sans serif type. However, 12-year-olds deal with sans serif fonts far more often. That’s why we ultimately picked the sans serif face called Opague to set body text — a designer of a conventional textbook would have done exactly the opposite. When we started working on the book, Opague had just been released, and Repose came out around the same time. We were absolutely in love with it and immediately knew that Repose was exactly what we needed.

We also really wanted to use Qommodore for many things — specifically, its Extra Black weight. It was heavily present in the early versions of the layout. However, we eventually felt that it might be pushing the design too far toward a glossy aesthetic, so Qommodore is now used only for the headline of the inset story about the ancient settlement of Çatalhöyük, as well as in a few small elements such as asterisks and arrows.

Volume 1. Artists

Nikita Vasilevskiy, Igor Gurovich, Misha Gurovich, Masha Krasnova-Shabaeva, Daria Rychkova, Facultative Works, mina milk.

Project team

Project Lead and Author: Filipp Dzyadko. Academic Supervisor: Andrey Zorin. Authors of the Historical Concept: Anastasia Papushina, Anna Sokolova. Producer: Sonya Goryacheva. Managing Editor: Marina Nafikova. Editor: Daria Timchenko, Academic Reviewer and History Teacher: Denis Lanshchikov. History Teacher: Nadezhda Kalashnikova. Art direction: Daria Yarzhambek, Yury Ostromentsky. Fact-checker: Alexey Boronenko. Author of Infographics: Vyacheslav Rogozhnikov. Author of Comics and Recipe Texts: Yuri Saprykin Jr. Photo Editor: Natalia Shlyakhovaya.