Troubadour poster, Opera Plovdiv

4 Comments on “Troubadour poster, Opera Plovdiv”

1. Florian Hardwig says:

   Jun 8th, 2016 1:14 pm

   Now that’s odd! Looks like this poster for Verdi’s Il Trovatore at the Plovdiv Opera uses the Latin glyphs of Rudolf Koch’s Deutsche Schrift (a.k.a. Koch-Fraktur) to approximate the Cyrillic Трубадур (Troubadour). I’m not aware of a Cyrillic version of this typeface. The ‘б’ appears to be a modified ‘b’. I’m curious to hear how well the ‘g’ works as stand-in for ‘д’, for native eyes.

2. Vasko Nicolov says:

   May 12th, 2017 12:02 pm

   Hi Florian,

   I am the author of this poster and I created it around 1985. I only adapted the letters needed for the poster, I didn’t modify the entire font. (A wonderful typeface by Rudolf Koch, as you have noted yourself).

   There are 2 basic types of modifying fonts to Cyrillic, Russian and Bulgarian, and in this instance it is the Bulgarian one.

   Thank you for your comment. I would happily answer any other questions you may have.

3. Florian Hardwig says:

   May 12th, 2017 2:37 pm

   Hi Vasko,

   very nice to hear from you! I have added your name to the design credits. It’s interesting to hear that this poster is already 30 years old — I somehow had assumed it was much more recent.

   I was aware that there is a preference for certain letterforms in Bulgarian typography which don’t match the Russian ones, but I didn’t know that the ‘д’ can be homoglyphic with a Latin monocular ‘g’.

   Some designers have included both forms in their Cyrillic type designs. Here is an example by Botio Nikoltchev. In his Ropa Soft, the default ‘д’ has the Bulgarian form. The Russian one can be activated via the OpenType feature Stylistic Set 4:

   

   Do you recall why you chose such a Germanic type style for the poster about an Italian opera — maybe to match the illustration? Are you aware of other examples of Cyrillic blackletter?

   What are you up to nowadays? Please feel invited to show other works of yours — I would love to see more typography from Bulgaria!

4. Bojidar Hinkov says:

   Jun 12th, 2018 3:28 am

   Поздравления, Васе! Имаш и други неща за показване, и и Флориан те кани да го направиш тъй като има интерес към българската типография.

   [Translation: “Congratulations, Vas! You have other things to show, and Florian invites you to do so as he has an interest in Bulgarian typography.”]