Newspeak Font Family was designed by Jonathan Barnbrook and published by Barnbrook Fonts. Newspeak contains 2 styles and family package options. Newspeak is a display typeface based upon Soviet architectural forms from the Stalinist period (spanning the 1930s—’50s). Stalinist architecture is now considered unsightly and without aesthetic merit, yet it has a strange beauty, hinting at an unrealised utopia (while its function was to buttress a brutal dictatorship). Inspiration was also drawn from the Cyrillic alphabet which, to kids growing up in Western Europe in the ’70s and ’80s, was a cipher for an alternative way of living – Cyrillic letterforms represented the exotic, familiarity-twice-removed universe of Eastern Bloc states. When you visited a communist country you were confronted with unfamiliar typography that reinforced your sense of alienation and unease that there existed a real, if imperfect, working alternative to consumerism.
