Maregraphe Poster

One day — while looking for an idea of a new typeface, — Yury Ostromentsky walked into a pavilion of Marseille tide gauge (marégraphe in French), a coastal station that has been daily measuring the change in sea level since the late 19th century. On the wall of the pavilion, he found a text with unusual details. Yury noticed low contrast and close proportions of that typeface, and remembered the age-relevant French lettering. And then — as he tends to do! — Ostromentsky mixed slightly insane graphics of historic prototypes with his own wild preferences in letterforming and, armed with this blend, started working on a modern serif.

The serif turned out sharp and concise, coming in the range of 20 styles — from small size text (Caption) to super-display (Poster) — plus a variable font. Maregraphe offers an impressive case: small caps; regular, tabular and text figures (with currency signs, mathematical symbols and punctuation for each set); circled figures; indexes; arrows.

Alternative symbols deserve your particular attention — they are capable of driving a rather reserved basic setting up to the emotional passion of the prototype, or even make it sound louder.

Besides Ostromentsky, the team working on Maregraphe included Mikhail Strukov and Ilya Ruderman; mastering was done by Ro Hernández, and kerning — by Igino Marini.

Specimen (PDF, 676 KB)

Features

Small capitals, case sensitive forms, standard ligatures, proportional lining figures, proportional oldstyle figures, tabular lining figures, tabular oldstyle figures, ordinals, fractions, denominator, numerator, subscript / inferiors, superscript / superiors, seven stylistic sets

Languages

Afrikaans, Albanian, Azeri (cyr), Azeri (lat), Bashkir, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chechen, Chuvash, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Gaelic (Irish), Galician, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ingush, Italian, Kazakh, Kurdish (lat), Kyrghiz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Moldavian (cyr), Mongolian (cyr), Mongolian (lat), Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Tadzhik, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Uzbek (lat)

Authors

CSTM Fonts

Ilya Ruderman and Yury Ostromentsky (CSTM Fonts)

They are both graphic and type designers. Founders of CSTM Fonts (2014) type foundry and a new font distributor type.today (2016).

Graduated from Moscow State University of Print (Graphic Design Department), where they took Alexander Tarbeev’s classes. Later Ilya Ruderman graduated from Type & Media (Royal Academy of Art), the Hague, the Netherlands. After graduation he was a tutor of Type&Typography course at British Higher School of Art and Design, Moscow (2008-2015), was an art-director of information agency RIA Novosti. He is an author of cyrillic versions of such typeface as Lava, Graphik, Neutraface and others, that was made for such studios as Typotheque, Commercial Type, Typonine and House Industries. He is an author of: Permian typeface, Big City Grotesque and several other corporate typefaces.

Before 2013 Yury Ostromentsky worked mostly as an editorial designer and art-director of BigCity Magazine, where he used his personal lettering, that was the base of the Pilar typeface, released by CSTM Fonts last year. He is an author of several book series designs and logotypes.

Both typefaces of Ilya Ruderman and Yury Ostromentsky were the winners of such type design competitions as Modern Cyrillic 2009, Modern Cyrillic 2014, Granshan 2011, European Design Award 2012. Kazimir typeface and Tele2 Typefamily, the CSTM Fonts’s latest releases, were among the winners of Granshan 2015.

Yury Ostromentsky

Graphic and type designer, co-founder of type.today store. Graduate of the Moscow State University of Printing Arts (Department of Arts and Technical Design of Printed Materials). Yury worked as a designer and art director for publishers and design studios. From 2004 to 2012, he was art director with Bolshoy Gorod (Big City) magazine. In 2004, he and lya Ruderman, Dmitry Yakovlev, and Daria Yarzhambek launched the DailyType webpage. Later in 2014, Yury and Ilya Ruderman founded CSTM Fonts type design studio which released Pilar, Big City Grotesque, Kazimir, Navigo, Normalidad, RIA Typeface, Lurk, Loos, Maregraph typefaces and CSTM Xprmntl series, as well as Cyrillic versions of Druk, Graphik, Spectral, Stratos and Apoc. The works by Ostromentsky and CSTM Fonts were awarded by European Design Award, Granshan and Modern Cyrillic Competition.

Ilya Ruderman

Ilya is a type and graphic designer and teacher, lives and works in Barcelona. He is a graduate of the Moscow State University of the Printing Arts (2002), where his graduation project was done under the supervision of Alexander Tarbeev. He has a MA degree in type design from the Type & Media program at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (2005). After completing the program, he returned to Moscow, where he has collaborated for a number of media: Kommersant, Afisha, Moskovskiye Novosti, Bolshoi Gorod and Men’s Health Russia. In 2005-2007 he was art director for Afisha’s city guidebooks, following which he was art director for RIA-Novosti, a news agency, for several years. In 2007–2015 he has also supervised the curriculum in type and typography at the British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow. He has been very active as a consultant on Cyrillic since 2008. In 2014 he founded CSTM Fonts with Yury Ostromentsky.

Typefaces by Ilya Ruderman: BigCity Grotesque Pro, Kazimir, Kazimir Text, Navigo, Permian (a typeface-brand for the city of Perm) and Cyrillic versions of: Austin, Dala Floda, Graphik, Marlene, Moscow Sans (as a consultant), Typonine Sans, Thema.

Codepage

Font in use

Maregraphe Collection

Maregraphe Poster

CSTM Fonts

Yury Ostromentsky

Ilya Ruderman