Balkan Sans

Balkan is a bi-script Latin and Cyrillic typeface system rooted in the linguistic proximity of languages of former Yugoslavia (Bosnian, Montenegrin, Croatian and Serbian). The Balkan typeface system depoliticises and reconciles the scripts, for the sake of education, tolerance and, above all, communication. Balkan transliterates and translates Croatian Latin into Serbian Cyrillic and vice versa, thus the fonts serve as educational software capable of reconciling disparate scripts.

There are two styles of Balkan – style A situates the Latin characters on top, and Cyrillic at the bottom, while style B reverses this order. There are three more substyles (1, 2, 3) in option A – each with slightly different treatments of elements that exceed the bounding box of the words.

Originally, Balkan was developed for writing Serbian and Croatian, which share the same sounds. Later, we expanded Balkan to also include other Cyrillic- and Latin-based languages, which was a complex task as there are a large number of these, and there is no single agreed standard for its transliteration into Latin script. We reviewed the most common romanisation schemes to create OpenType Stylistic Sets that encompass most common options for transliterating Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Ukrainian letters into English and German.