Кассета МК-60 insert

This insert is for a cassette tape manufactured at the Kazan Photogelatine Plant (Казанский Фотожелатиновый Завод) in Tatarstan, USSR, around 1975. The bold display typeface is lowercase Madeleine, designed by Colin Brignall at Graphic Systems in the UK and adopted around 1972 by Mecanorma, the French manufacturer of dry transfer lettering.

Brignall didn’t design any Cyrillic characters for Madeleine, but this didn’t pose a problem to the unknown Soviet designer. All letters needed to spell out “кассета мк-60” (“MK-60 cassette”) could be obtained by repurposing their Latin doppelgängers: kaccema mk·60. In case you wonder why an m was used instead of a t (or T): the shape of the Cyrillic letter te (т) changes quite drastically in cursive/italic construction. Showing an upright cursive form was easier than trimming a Latin T to the x-height. Most other text is set in caps from a Cyrillic version of Helvetica.

The image above is a faithful redrawing made by Huw Gwilliam in 2018, and kindly shared under a Creative Commons license. You can see a scan of the original below.