The Essence of the Hay

Cousins Kirill Danchenko and Dima Aleksashin, founders of Astroshock, specialize in website and mobile application development. In the summer of 2019, they drove from Moscow to Vladivostok and tried to answer one difficult question: what is the essence of hay? Эссенция сенца (“The Essence of the Hay”) is a book about this road trip. From our interview with Kirill Danchenko:

We were sitting in one of Novosibirsk’s cafes, slowly flipping through a travel book by Sergey Dolya, and suddenly realised that we could tell about our trip on paper, too, only in a completely different manner. […]

At the beginning of summer 2020, we approached ABCDesign and a week later got as many as three concepts from different designers. Naturally, we discarded all three of them. As a result, it took us about 10 takes until we finally agreed on an idea of the final layout. […]

The fonts are actually the most important element of the book. If there were about 10 takes on concepts, it took us two or three times more fonts to consider and choose from. Finally, we picked two typefaces that were OK for use in terms of feelings and worked great together: Aeroport for headlines, Kazimir Text for anything else — body text, captions. It was a separate pleasure to observe how the pair was acting on different pages!

Kazimir Text is a typeface from the large collection Kazimir + Kazimir Text, designed by CSTM Fonts, with lesser (compared to Kazimir) contrast and extended character map. Kazimir Text’s 22 styles support extended Latin and Cyrillic.

Read the entire article on the type.today website, and see more images on ABCDesign’s portfolio website.