Typeface Design for Lineto

From a single-page Soviet archive find to a dual-script titling font

LL Heymland, designed by Yevgeniy Anfalov and released by Lineto in 2020, originates from an undated calligraphic study found in the estate of Soviet graphic artist Solomon Telingater, itself referencing Rudolf Koch's Koch Antiqua (ca. 1922). Anfalov stripped the source letterforms of perceived superfluous detail, systematically unified shapes, and introduced a large number of new glyphs to produce a full titling font. The family launched simultaneously with complete Latin and Cyrillic character sets—a first for Lineto—with font engineering handled by Alphabet, Berlin.

Set in LL Heymland

Insights

Anfalov's process moved from archival hand-lettering through deliberate geometric simplification and optical correction to avoid a mechanical result.
The Cyrillic character set draws partly on a Cyrillic adaptation of Koch Antiqua documented in a 1970 Russian type-design manual.
Custom ligatures were drawn for the typeface's debut in TATE ETC. magazine (Summer 2020, designed by Studio Ard) and later incorporated into the retail font.
The archive study's letterforms appear geometrically more pronounced and less mannered than the identical layout published in a 1960 calligraphy book edited by Estonian designer Villu Toots, and some specialists question Telingater's authorship of the study.