Typeface Design for Atomgrad

Four stencilled letters on a Chernobyl basement wall became the seed of a full Latin and Cyrillic type family

Atomgrad began as FF Chernobyl (1998), a stencil typeface Stephan Müller derived from four Cyrillic letters—ЧАЭС—stencilled on a basement wall at the Chernobyl power plant, spotted in a 1991 newspaper photograph by Igor Kostin. In 2020, Ukrainian type designer Yevgeniy Anfalov, born in Kyiv in 1986—the year of the disaster—proposed building a native Cyrillic extension, a dialectical homecoming for the letters' origin. The Latin was entirely redrawn in the process; Viktoriya Grabowska refined the Cyrillic, and Luca Pellegrini completed the character set and formal revision. Font engineering and mastering were handled by Alphabet, Berlin.

Set in Atomgrad, FF Chernobyl

Insights

Müller extrapolated an entire upper- and lowercase Latin alphabet from just four Cyrillic source letters, working from a minimal newspaper photograph
The source letters reflect a Soviet industrial stencil tradition valued for being hand-producible and inexpensive
The 2020 revival involved fully redrawing the Latin alongside building the new Cyrillic counterpart
The project involved four named contributors across three credited years (1998, 2020, 2021), reflecting a staged, multi-author development