Svetoslav Simov is a graphic designer and typographer who has been fascinated by letterforms since his teenage years as a graffiti artist. While he eventually went on to begin his career in graphic design, he was always drawn to the mathematical aspect of type design and eventually his path would take an entirely new direction.
Having no formal training in type design, Svetoslav chose to explore the field on his own, gaining firsthand experience through trial and error and also through the study and observation of quality typography. To this day, he takes a very methodical approach to his work, always keeping a font’s potential usability in mind. Aesthetics are important, as well, and a type design must be as versatile and functional as it can be.
Based in Sofia, Bulgaria, Svetoslav established the Fontfabric type foundry in 2008. More than ten years later, Fontfabric has since grown to become one of the most accomplished foundries to emerge out of Bulgaria, working with international brands that include Nestlé, Nike, Lipton, and CNET, just to name a few. The foundry puts a strong emphasis on collaboration and education, offering unwavering support to its team and regularly conducting workshops and lectures on the subject of typography.
Fontfabric is well known for its dedication to not only type design in general, but its integration of Cyrillic characters. Much of this is due to its home country’s typographical history. Bulgaria served as the birthplace of the Cyrillic alphabet in the tenth century – lettering that eventually spread throughout the region and is now used by more than 250 million people worldwide. Fontfabric honors that rich tradition by consistently incorporating the Cyrillic alphabet in their work and one of their latest releases through YouWorkForThem, Panton Rust, is no exception.
The “long-awaited Rust Bundle addition” to the Panton type family, Panton Rust is a superfamily of sans serif and script letter sets with a heavy vintage aesthetic. Designed by Stan Partalev, Ventsislav Djokov, and Plamen Motev, is “especially suitable for any design that speaks of craftsmanship, a sublime human touch, and a mature signature with undeniable flavor.”
Panton Rust is a family of 42 all-caps sans serifs that offer a variety of textures, shadows, and inlines. Featuring five weights that range from SemiBold to Heavy, this portion of the family is ideal for everything from headlines to bold displays, signage, product packaging, merchandise, apparel, logos, website designs, mobile applications, menus, event programs, book covers, posters, greeting cards, labels, tags, and marketing materials.
Panton Rust Script is a family of 30 connective cursive script character sets with a casual, retro vibe. Available in the same weights and with various textures, shadows, and inlines, Panton Rust Script works well when paired with Panton Rust or on its own as the focal point of a design. It’s beautifully suited to advertising, apparel, merchandise, product packaging, logos, social media imagery, greeting cards, marketing materials, labels, tags, posters, and any project that needs a softly-curved vintage cursive script on center stage.
Panton Rust offers additional flexibility through OpenType features that include case-sensitive forms, fractions, ordinals, subscript, superscript, scientific inferiors, tabular figures, and stylistic alternates. Panton Script Rust additional offers terminal forms, initial forms, isolated forms, and contextual alternates. The entire family extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Afrikaans, and Cyrillic for exceptionally far-reaching accessibility in designs intended for an international audience.
If you’re curious to try Panton Rust but you’re not entirely sold yet, you can try out Panton Rust Heave Grunge Shadow and Panton Rust Script SemiBold Grunge for free!
Fontfabric currently offers more than 45 products through YouWorkForThem, a range of serif, slab serif, sans serif, script, and display fonts to suit a wide variety of project types. Visit their portfolio to take a look at the rest of their work and if you love what you see, bookmark it so you can check back for new releases!
