Igor Shaferan – Everest album art
Everest (Эверест) is an album with songs to poems by Soviet musician Igor Shaferan (Игорь Шаферан, 1932–1994). It was released on the Melodyia (Мелодия) label in 1985.
For the cover, designer Pavel Shegeryan (Павел Шегерян) piled up glyphs from Block Up to form a mountain of Himalayan dimensions, and added a tiny climber with rope for scale.
Sally-Ann Grover’s 3D block alphabet (Letraset, 1974) didn’t offer support for the Cyrillic script. By repurposing a modified numeral 3 and the Latin B, E, P, C and T, Shegeryan was able to approximate the glyphs he needed to spell “ЭВЕРЕСТ”. He pulled the same trick for the smaller title in Zipper. Again, the Э isn’t a direct match for the 3 as included in the typeface – its shape had to be customized in order to work for Cyrillic readers.
The sans appears to be a version of Zhurnalnaya Roublennaya. It’s different in various details from the font shown here, and has more in common with the digital Journal Sans (1991).
1 Comment on “Igor Shaferan – Everest album art”
I revisited Zhurnalnaya Roublennaya and found the explanation: while sizes up to 12pt follow Erbar-Grotesk more closely, see the two-story a and the open numerals 2 3 5, larger sizes from 14pt are more in line with Futura in these details.
You can see the glyph sets for the 12pt and 14pt sizes side by side in a specimen from 1962. Shown below is a visual comparison taken from another catalog that was likewise kindly digitized by Art Lebedev, Каталог ручных и машинных шрифтов from 1966, featuring the 12pt size and the 16pt size.
The differences in the smaller sizes extend to wider forms with pointed apexes for A M N V W, a center vertex in M that reaches the baseline, a shorter tail on Q that doesn’t cross into the counter, an untailed t with diagonal top terminal, and more. Similar differences can be observed in the Cyrillic: glyphs of note include the curly diagonals in жЖ and Кк, a narrower Л, a У with , as well as the Ф with wider bowls, among others.
Some of this is reflected in Grilli Type’s digital interpretation GT Eesti, which comes in Display and Text versions. See also Ivar Sakk’s article about this “poor man’s Futura”.