First ideas for the project emerged in the autumn of 2024. At the time, I was doing an internship at a French type design studio. Surrounded by the rich beauty of Paris and looking at typefaces every day, I felt an increasing urge to start working on a new typeface.
Typeface brief can take shape through different processes. In my case, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to work on something experimental, a project that would create a dialogue between historical letterforms and contemporary approaches.
More specifically, I wanted to explore Vyaz, an ornamental writing style derived from Byzantine culture that played a significant role in the history of Ukrainian writing. In terms of character, I was drawn to something sharp, carved, chiseled.
I began exploring the idea further, and by the time I was about to leave France I had already digitized a first set of letters. Gathering all my courage, I decided to show them at the studio and ask for honest critique. I received several helpful comments, but these words stayed with me the most: “The logic is there but it needs to be refined. Look at your “e” and now at your “n”, how their weight is distributed. Once you resolve this, the system will work”.
That was my first real aha! moment. How did I not notice this before? At some point working with modules took over and in some letters consistency had slipped away.
If rules are broken, it should happen intentionally. And usually, when one system is broken, another should replace it. With this in mind, a new phase of hand explorations began — the kind that, when you’re trying to truly understand something, is rarely neat or tidy.
At that point, I had a clearer sense of what I was looking for. Next — digitizing different concepts, choosing a direction, experimenting with proportions, and thinking about which axes I wanted to push. Should I make a very heavy version with only minimal counterspace? Should I work with optical sizes — varying the level of abstraction in the letterforms? Or should I push the width?
After a lot of experimentation, I decided that working with optical size and pushing the level of abstraction was the most interesting direction for what I wanted to achieve. I was working with two fonts, no interpolation. And even though everything seemed to be in place — I could continue refining the letterforms and expanding the character set — I wasn’t satisfied.
I kept asking myself: Is that it? Is this really how my final typeface is going to look? Something felt unresolved, but I couldn’t quite identify what was missing. So I left the project aside for a few weeks.
When I returned to it, I began looking again at my reference board and at my earlier sketches, where the idea of letter deconstruction had been present from the very beginning.
I also remembered a folder in my gallery called “Letters from the streets”. For some time I had been photographing signages — PVC letters on storefronts that start to delaminate over time under weather conditions.
This was my second aha! moment — the missing piece of the puzzle. I realized that I needed to design another master made only of bars: no distractions, just simple strokes drawn in a very specific way so that the shapes I had already designed could emerge from them.
With that, the structure of the project changed. Instead of working with two separate fonts, I switched to a variable one. Seeing the first variable test come to life was incredibly exciting!
Revisiting my references and initial inspiration also helped me solve another question — proportion. In Vyaz, spacing plays a key role in why the letters look so decorative. Simply put, the space between stems is equal to the stem itself. This creates a distinctive “barcode-like” rhythm, which I wanted to preserve.
Of course, some compensations were needed. “Rounded” letters required adjustments, more deconstructed forms needed more generous spacing. Still, this gave me a solid starting point and helped establish a clear principle for spacing.
After that, the process became more or less standard: designing, expanding the character set, proofing, iterating. Alongside general proofing, an important part of the process was constantly checking how the interpolation behaved and regularly returning to the drawings to keep the distortions under control, so to say.
At some point it was time to start thinking about the name. You can’t just call it XYZ and forget about it, right? I returned to my references — Vyaz, manuscripts, coins. I looked at the letters I had ended up with: very decorative, yet sharp.
Then I remembered Dukat (or Dukach) — a traditional Ukrainian women’s metal breast ornament made of a row of coins, usually centered around an embossed medallion. Recently, interest in it has been revived and it’s being actively incorporated into modern outfits. This felt like a perfect fit.
And just how sometimes you instinctively feel what name would suit a stranger, I looked at my typeface and could clearly say — yes, this is Dukat.
The process of creating Dukat often felt like carving and chiseling, shaping both the letterforms and the concept at the same time. Doubting, revisiting decisions, not being afraid to pivot, and experimenting were all part of bringing the idea to life. And once one idea is realized, it creates space for the next ones.
Check out Dukat — and stay tuned.
