KTF Metro
A Font Family in Honor of the Kyiv Metro
The new typeface KTF Metro by Kyiv Type Foundry portray Ukraine’s Soviet Heritage and current war.
Yevgen Anfalov and Oles Gergun, the founders of Kyiv Type Foundry, held a workshop to pay tribute to the importance of the Kyiv Metro, resulting in the creation of the exciting new family release called KTF Metro inspired by it. The Kyiv Type Foundry specializes in crafting Cyrillic (and Latin) fonts, drawing inspiration from typography originating from Ukraine’s Soviet era.
Echoing WWII events, in 2022 Kyiv Metro became the bomb shelter for thousands of its inhabitants. This sad fact is another big milestone in its rich history, which continues to be written. Built six decades ago, it carries 1.32 million passengers a day (2016) and is one of the most beautiful manmade creations in Ukraine. As part of station architecture, the letters of the Kyiv Metro tell us a lot about its history. It’s a book. You can read it in many directions. Exiting on each station, you’ll notice different letterings. “Look at them, analyze and make fonts on their basis”, the workshop leaders told to their students in the summer 2023 workshop called “Kyiv Metro Fonts.” So they worked on it for a week and the editors of Kyiv Type Foundry took and carefully finished five most representative of them. The result is a family release called KTF Metro, aiming to preserve the typographic memory of the city. Additionally, the workshop leaders interviewed Oleg Totsky, a metro historian and specialist. His answers open up the context in which the Kyiv Metro letters emerged and supplement the showcased typefaces respectively.
Show your support for Ukrainian and Cyrillic type design! The typeface is entirely free of charge for Ukrainians—but as Ukraine is still in a state of emergency, the creators of the typeface and the Kyiv Type Foundry would like to ask you for a donation. Use their PayPal (paypal.com/paypalme/kyivtypefoundry), and they’ll distribute the money among those in a need and report by the end of 2024.
Learn more about the project and download the fonts here!
