• Victoria Astakhova
• Designer of the project

Immaterial Future Association is a young organisation that explores sustainment of cultural projects. Its philosophy is based on the assumption that the surplus (aka overproduction) economy leads us nowhere, and we have reached the point where the only valuable thing is intellectual capital — related to art and certain story, certain experience.

The association has recently carried out an open call on developing a business model for monetizing culture-related projects. The winner is supposed to have found a way to help culture and social capital pay off. The examples of successful mechanics: when a project is first launched using crowdfunding and then starts to make money, or — when a musician gets a ruble for every stream on a streaming service platform.

That is an international project with a large audience, so I wanted to use and to show ‘our’ typeface. I came across Nekst in the Readymag catalogue — it seems to be both about the past and the distant future. It is like the Wassily Chair — something simple, versatile and casual, pleasing the designer.

The Wassily Chair designed by Marcel Breyer

If the project is to be continued, I think, we could find some serif to pair Nekst, but so far Nekst manages to perfectly handle the entire task on its own. It is really great to use at small sizes — no readability issues, everything looks clear and easy.

One more thing — Nekst is not as popular as Stratos or Druk, for example. At some point everyone wanted to speak in Druk’s voice, and it is now everywhere. You apply it to your layout and then ask yourself: ‘is it me, or is it Yandex?’

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Nekst is a geometric sans authored by Minsk-based designer Denis Serebryakov who also designed Displace and Taler from our today’s storefront as well as Epos, which is available in our tomorrow library. Nekst comes in seven weight options ranging from Thin to Black and with an extensive set of alternates.