“Colored Peas” Soviet candy packaging

Octopuss Shaded was released in Letraset’s Letragraphica range of typefaces for dry transfer lettering in 1974. It came with a basic Latin character set covering English and, thanks to the inclusion of a handful of diacritics and the German eszett, a few more Western European orthographies.

This didn’t stop an anonymous designer in the Soviet Union to use it for the packaging of драже «цветной горошек» (drazhe «tsvetnoy goroshek»), a brand of sweet dragéees with a name that translates to “colored peas”. Colin Brignall’s chubby design with its rounded terminals apparently was too good a fit for the candies to let its meager language support get in the way.

For most of the Cyrillic letters, the designer could repurpose the existing Latin ones. The eszett (ß) stands in as ve (в), u was combined with a period for the short i (й), and s was mirrored for ghe (г) – this letter takes on such a curvier form in italic as well as in casual styles like this. Furthermore, m was turned upside down to obtain a passable sha (ш). The only glyphs that required a little more effort were tse (ц) and en (н).

The fourteen letterforms were arranged on a bouncing baseline, overlapping each other, filled in alternating colors and made even more appetizing by adding highlight effects. “ДРАЖЕ” is added in black sans-serif caps that are likewise drawn by hand, and may or may not be patterned after Futura Extra Bold.

Via @vintage_retro_story, a collection of designs from the USSR, curated by Natalia Kirichenko.

See more such makeshift typography in the “DIY language extensions” set.