this isn't quite a conlang thing but i thought this might be a good place to ask. i'm working on a type set based around a segmented display similar to what you might see on alarm clocks, calculators, etc, but with more segments:

so i did a character set for latin letters, numbers, punctuation, etc.:


basically the idea is that it's something you might see on a display screen in some cyberpunk movie from thirty years ago

i decided to do a cyrillic set (starting with the russian letters, maybe moving on to other cyrillic characters later). but there were a couple letter forms i had trouble with, and i was wondering if anyone had any suggestions. here's what i have:

the last six glyphs are possible variants. i wasn't sure how good or readable the Д was (an alternate version is the first variant glyph at bottom); i didn't know what to do for Ё (three [weird] possibilities are shown, although as you can tell from the first row i originally just skipped it); and i couldn't decide which forms to go with for Ц and Щ. also i think the Ф and Ю look funny while we're at it

does anyone who's more familiar with cyrillic type have any suggestions? opinions on readability? etc. doesn't have to just be on the characters i mentioned

Peanut gallery response of no critical import: this looks amazing. Most attempts at geometric constructivist typography start with something similar, but they never turn out terribly well; in particular, designers tend to get upset about the tipsy look of the S.

I wouldn't bend head over heels to worry about readability, as it makes perfect sense that some of the characters would be rendered horribly on a device being pushed near its limits, especially a) if it were imported or b) if it were repurposed. Consider how awkward some 15-segment displays can be.

What matters most of all, I think, is working within the limitations of the mindset of the creators of the hardware; consider, for example, how poor ASCII is for representing most European languages (unless one has overstrike available.) If you wanted to explicitly expand to include Cyrillic support, though, one thing you could do to help with the rendering of Ë would be to put the pseudo-diaresis/umlaut inside of the letter, which was fashionable in some German-speaking countries during the Art Nouveau movement, roughly like this. Another option, sure to horrify our resident crypto-Kremlinologists (do we have any of those?) far more would be a horrible orthographic kludge like <йо>, which would definitely add to the dystopian "language forced to fit inside the machine" feel.

That cyrillic D is a neat solution, either way! Also, Rhet, from what you're describing, I thought more of something like this. There, the dots are actually inside the O.

Yes! But not sideways. While Googling I found a lot of examples of ü drawn like that, but none of the older samples I'd previously seen of the umlaut clearly inside or overlaid (with a slight negative margin cut into the letter, as if someone had taken two bites from it) on the letter. Personally, I think either would be a lot more legible than rotating it.

quoting Rhetorica, Kelatetía: Dis, Major Belt 1:

Peanut gallery response of no critical import: this looks amazing.

WSS.

I've mooted around doing this for Armenian, but it seems really, really difficult. Congrats for doing such a good job with Cyrillic!

Wrt the descenders on ц щ, I think that the style where you have a horizontal line running from left to right is better, if only to increase the visual contrast between ц and и. Otherwise, I also think this looks pretty great.