Isay Solomonovich Slutsker

Isay Solomonovich Slutsker, the renowned Russian type designer, died of massive heart attack on Sunday, 20th January 2002. Isay Slutsker was born in Orel on 25 September 1924. He was seventeen when World War II came to Russia. He fought the Nazi invasion, like so many other boys of his age. Not many of them came back; he did. However, he was gravely wounded: he lost both legs. In 1949, after his graduation from Moscow Printing Institute, he started working at the Type Design Department of VNIIPoligraphmash (National Printing Research Institute). From 1991 he worked for ParaType, Moscow. Isay Slutsker worked for major Soviet publishers, Khudozhestvennaya Literatura and Prosveshcheniye, designing and illustrating general fiction literature and textbooks.

Slutsker designed many typefaces for a number of scripts and writing systems. Among his Cyrillic and Latin designs are Baltica (1951-2, a spin-off of Candida-Antiqua by Jakob Erbar; in co-operation with Vera Chiminova); Bruskovaya Gazetnaya ('Slab-serif newstype', 1949; in co-operation with Alexandra Korobkova); Mysl (1986, a makeover of the typeface originally created by Vera Chiminova in 1966); PT Caslon (1962 and 1992, a version of the ATF Caslon; assisted by Tatiana Lyskova); ITC Franklin Gothic Cyrillic (1993; assisted by Tatiana Lyskova); PT BT Humanist 531 Cyrillic (1988, based on the Bitstream version of Syntax, by Hans Eduard Meier; assisted by Manvel Shmavonyan); PT BT Geometric Slabserif 712 (1999, based on the Bitstream version of Monotype Rockwell; assisted by Manvel Shmavonyan).

Slutsker Greek typefaces are: Obyknovennaya Novaya ('New Standard', 1950s); Rublenaya Slutskera ('Slutsker Sans'; 1960s); Chronos (1980s). Isay Slutsker created several typefaces for Indic languages: Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada; he designed two Amharic and one Hangul typeface, Inmin.

Slutsker, a veteran of WWII, was highly decorated with many Soviet military medals and orders, in recognition of his bravery and outstanding performance of duty. For his creative work he received many prizes and awards. Slutsker's Humanist 531 Cyrillic was among the winners of Kyrillitsa'99, the contest for Cyrillic type design held in December 1998 in Moscow, and of bukva:raz!, the type design competition of the Association Typographique Internationale of 2001.

from Maxim Zhukov