Belgrade Street Signage – The urgency for two script

With my talk I would like to expand on the research behind my Type and Media graduation project – Petria, its historical aspect, and how I translated that accumulated knowledge into a type family. Petria is a typeface inspired by old Art Nouveau signs and overall art movement present on the Balkans in the early 20th century. Its styles were born out of the idea of designing a type family that would solve an existing problem of combining two different scripts – Latin and Cyrillic, and be used for inner city signage and way-finding for the city of Belgrade, Serbia. The project’s initial focus was the legibility research in the context of design, and experiments to better understand what influences it and how to draw letter shapes as distinctive to the human eye as possible. It became a process of learning how to channel the energy and character I wanted its shapes to carry, while serving its purpose and being coherent throughout both scripts. Working on and designing both Latin and Cyrillic at the same time played a crucial part in the process, where I was able to observe how they would influence each other, rather than treating Cyrillic as a latter extension of the Latin. My goal was to not only accomplish design unity between fundamentally different scripts, but also have them portray city’s atmosphere.