Zvezdara: A Typeface Inspired by Serbian Heritage

Zvezdarska Šuma (Zvezdara Forest), a hilltop park in Belgrade, is one of the largest forested areas within the city and serves as a key source of oxygen for the Serbian capital. The park takes its name from the observatory built atop the hill in 1929–32, which was originally called a zvezdara (lit. “star-house”), rather than the modern Serbian opservatorija. A forest was planted around the observatory, and today it covers 137 hectares, 21 of which have been developed into a public park.

The park-forest is a beautiful and popular recreational area for locals, but it lacked a proper wayfinding system. A group of urban planners came up with the idea of enhancing the park’s infrastructure with clear signage for navigation and information boards about local flora and fauna—in short, developing a cohesive visual identity for the park.

A member of the urban planning team, art director Alexander Ustinov, proposed a custom typeface as the central element of the park’s new identity system. He also led development of the initial visual concept, built around the idea of “soft branding” that would preserve the natural atmosphere and harmony of the park while also expressing a sense of Serbian cultural identity. This direction was tested and refined through workshops, interviews, and community discussions, and it clearly resonated with local residents.

That’s when I was approached to join the team. My brief was to design a display typeface that would set the tone for the park’s visual identity. Its main purpose would be to convey a feeling, reflecting the spirit of the park. An existing typeface would later be selected to supplement the display typeface—something more neutral, for use in longer texts and at smaller sizes.

Together we began exploring ideas for a display typeface to realize this vision. Through surveys, workshops, and interviews, the team gathered feedback from local residents about their perceptions, identifying some key ideas that people associated with the park: kind, sheltering, child-friendly, green, important, magical, a place that sparks dreams and memories. These impressions became the foundation for developing the graphic concept behind the typeface.

Alexander and I discussed several possible directions for the typeface, exploring different conceptual approaches, each aiming to reflect the park’s atmosphere in its own way, but all grounded in the idea of a friendly design informed by Serbian culture.

1. Clean and relatively neutral: We would look for a lively, rounded sans serif including a well-crafted Serbian Cyrillic. For this approach, the typeface would serve a purely informational role, with other elements of the visual identity creating the emotional impact. It would also mean that we could use an existing typeface rather than designing one from scratch.

2. An aesthetic rooted in Yugoslav heritage: Modernism and brutalism naturally come to mind when thinking about Belgrade, but we knew that local residents associated the park with descriptors like kind, magical, and child-friendly, so this approach would likely have felt out of place.

3. Something more austere and academic: The idea here was to evoke the park’s namesake observatory and its associations with science and stargazing. But surveys showed that this association wasn’t central for the local community that actively uses the park.

4. Historical letterforms with a clear Slavic heritage: Thematically, this could be a natural fit for the park, but there was a risk that in its pure form, it might come across as stereotypical and heavy-handed.

While exploring visual directions for a typeface, I came across a great design reference that ended up fitting the project perfectly. Not far from Zvezdarska Šuma lies Belgrade’s oldest purpose-built cemetery (somewhat misleadingly called Novo Groblje, “New Cemetery”). Like many historical cemeteries, it’s a remarkable source of inspiration for type designers, offering hundreds of stone-carved inscriptions from different periods in a wide range of styles. One inscription on a chapel particularly caught my eye.

The chapel inscription perfectly matched what we were aiming for. It felt solid, but also soft and friendly, and it was rooted in local history. It successfully combined two of the directions we had outlined: a gentle, approachable sans that also featured historical Cyrillic letterforms.

The primary alphabet for the project would be Cyrillic (specifically, Serbian Cyrillic), so the design process began there. All exploration of letterforms happened first in Cyrillic, which for me is quite unusual; most of my projects start with Latin, with other scripts added later. In this case, the roles were reversed: Cyrillic led the way, and Latin followed.

The typeface was intended for display use only, and the project was a short-term pro bono initiative, so the team and I decided to limit ourselves to a single weight (demibold), and I focused on designing a minimal but functional character set. The display typeface would establish the visual tone for the project and even be used illustratively at times. For smaller labels and informational content, we needed a companion typeface, one that would be neutral and highly readable.

I began by translating the letterforms from the reference inscription into a contemporary typeface. This may sound straightforward, but in practice it was anything but. The original letters, hand-carved in stone, are full of charming imperfections and organic irregularities, qualities that don’t easily carry over into the precise, unforgiving geometry of font editing software.

I also had to carefully adapt the historical shapes of the inscription to a contemporary context, making sure not to overdo the personality. There’s a fine line between evoking tradition and drifting into pastiche, something that would feel overly decorative or even liturgical. This was the most time-consuming part of the design process: we explored countless combinations and letter shapes before finding a solution that felt right.

Visual features of the inscription lettering

In my view, the most defining shape in the reference inscription is the letter A. The form isn’t unique to this particular inscription; it has deep historical roots that can be traced back to uncial Latin and Greek writing from the 4th–7th century AD. The same is true of the rounded form of the letter E.

Cyrillic, which emerged in the late ninth century, borrowed many of its letterforms from Greek uncial, and began its life in the form of Ustav, a formal and highly structured writing style.

2. The shapes of Л and Д in this inscription echo the form of А and share the same origins.

Another detail that made its way into our typeface is the distinctive serif treatment on letters like Б, Г, and Т. This is a well-known feature of the Ustav style, even when other serifs are more understated. In our reference, these elements are clearly stylized to fit the dense, low-contrast construction of the letters, and they resonate nicely with the wedge-shaped terminals of letters like the Д and Ц.

4. One detail of the inscription lettering that was a natural fit for the new typeface was the construction of the letter И. The diagonal doesn’t reach the very bottom or top of the vertical stems. Interestingly, this form is still typical of modern Serbian Cyrillic. In Russian Cyrillic (especially in contemporary sans serifs), the diagonal in И usually connects the stems at the very bottom and very top. It’s also worth noting that in some historical sources, you’ll occasionally find the letter Н with a similarly slanted crossbar.

5. In historical Cyrillic inscriptions, it’s common to see round letters like О and С shaped like pointed teardrops or leaves, giving the text a distinctive rhythm and texture. Our chapel inscription features exactly this kind of construction, so I tried incorporating it into my design, but it wound up giving the new typeface a much stronger historical flavor than we wanted. In the end, I decided to step away from these features in favor of a more balanced, less idiosyncratic look.

Design Process

While working on the typeface, we also explored graphic nuances like a slight slant in horizontal strokes (as in В) and different branch constructions for letters like К and Ж. But through testing and layout mockups, it became clear that the simpler we kept the rest of the shapes, the better they worked for the project. After all, our goal was to create a contemporary typeface with historical references, not a historical revival. The more details we added, the more the design leaned toward a purely historical look, which wasn’t what we were after.

In the first stage of the design process, we decided to work with uppercase letters only, which was enough to test the concept in mockups and see if the typeface held up in practice.

Then it was time to think about a pairing. What we needed in a companion typeface:

– A relatively neutral, readable sans serif, suitable for small text and captions
– Letter construction, tone, and proportions that would harmonize with the main typeface
– Most importantly, it had to include a well-designed Serbian Cyrillic

It’s worth noting that finding a typeface with a high-quality Serbian Cyrillic isn’t easy—there are surprisingly few of them. In the end, we chose a Serbian initiative called Ћирилице на поклон (Ćirilice na poklon, “Cyrillic as a gift”), which offers a growing collection of free, well-crafted typefaces with Serbian Cyrillic support.

We selected Orto, designed by Ana Prodanović:

Some points about Orto:

– It’s slightly condensed in its proportions, just like our primary typeface; testing in layout mockups showed that it was economical, good for fitting text into tight spaces (an important consideration for this project)
– The subtle angular bends in strokes of letters like У, К, and Ж add texture and complexity, echoing the detailed construction of our display typeface
– It includes serifs on certain characters (e.g. С, 2, 3, 7), echoing the decorative serifs on select letters in our display typeface, included as a nod to the reference inscription
– The diagonal of the И follows the typical form for Serbian Cyrillic, as in our display typeface

To make the two typefaces even more compatible, I adjusted the construction of the У, М, and J in our display typeface. As I continued working on the design, I also made sure that any new characters added wouldn’t clash with forms found in Orto.

Next, we had to decide on an approach for the lowercase letters. We considered two options:

Designing them as small caps, with virtually no descenders: A more compact solution, which would work well in space-limited layouts. This is more practical for all-caps Serbian Cyrillic, where there are no diacritics, making tight line spacing easier to manage.

Developing a full set of true lowercase forms: While Cyrillic lowercase doesn’t differ drastically from small caps, the presence of descenders in certain letters would add rhythm and liveliness to text, improving overall readability.

In the end, we decided to go with a true lowercase.

The next step was to add Latin support. Serbia’s typographic landscape is unusual, in that Latin and Cyrillic are used side by side. Our focus was on Serbian Latin, so that’s where I started. Later, I expanded the character set to include full support for English as well.

I began by adding the Latin letters that directly correspond to their Cyrillic counterparts, then drew the remaining characters, making sure they matched the overall stylistic direction. As with the Cyrillic character set, certain letters (notably A and E) include nods to uncial script, grounding the Latin in the same visual logic.

I also included distinctive curved legs for K and R, and subtle decorative serifs on select characters. The lowercase g was drawn to echo the unique Serbian form of the lowercase б, creating a subtle link between the two scripts.

Overall, the Latin was designed to support the typeface’s personality without competing for attention or introducing visual noise.

Finally, I added figures, punctuation, and symbols, keeping the character set minimal but functional, enough to make the typeface not only usable for the park’s identity, but also adaptable for other projects, especially since it’s intended for free public distribution.

Working on this project gave me a chance to dive deep into Cyrillic letterforms, exploring how they’re used in Serbia, and reinterpreting them in a contemporary typeface. It was unusual, but also rewarding, for me to focus primarily on developing a Cyrillic script. There’s so much potential to explore in its forms.

It was a fascinating challenge to weave historical forms into the design without slipping into stereotypical historicism, and I hope this approach can be applied to other projects, whether related to this park or entirely different contexts.

Zvezdara is available for download, free for anyone to use. I’m excited to see how others might put this typeface to use in their own creative work.

Credits
Type Design—Yulia Gonina
Art Direction—Alexander Ustinov
Transport Urbanism—Alexey Radchenko
Urban Planning—Artem Efremenko
Sociology—Fedor Dokukin
Design—Nina Osipova
Project Management—Maria Khomutskikh
Editorial (article)—C. Isaaс Rockliff