odd works is growing.
We’re excited to welcome our long-time collaborator and friend Alina Golubeva ( @alinago ) as our third partner and Executive Producer.
Based in London, Alina brings over a decade of cross-disciplinary experience in creative production. Her background spans cultural and commercial work — from producing large-scale sound and art projects for global brands to developing performances and events across music and contemporary art.
Together, we’re expanding what a design studio can be.
Visuals made in collaboration with @whoisheezus
#oddworks
Hello world, we are open!
Odd works is a multidisciplinary design studio based in Lisbon and Saint-Petersburg, founded by Pavel Ripley and Alex Pushkarev.
Working with clients around the world, we provide design and art services, creative direction, visual identities, website and book design, packaging, motion design and video direction (and many more).
It has been almost six months since our return. We have been caught up in a whirlwind of new, exciting, inspiring and thrilling events. These include our eldest son's first year of school, and moving to the most beautiful city on earth - my native St. Petersburg. And educational collaborations with DesignWorkout and ITMO, and a promising opportunity to start teaching at Vyshka (HSE), and much more. But often, in the evenings, we sit in the kitchen and reminisce about Fethiye.
Our Turkish trip, which lasted for two years, new acquaintances that became the most important in our lives, emotions, sun, nature, fresh fruit - all this will remain in our hearts forever. It was a truly life-changing moment that made us think differently and act differently. We were able to re-evaluate many life situations, attitudes, aspirations. Finally, we were able to engage in creativity - or rather, to make it visible not only to ourselves, but to everyone around us. This turned out to be an important moment, because what we were doing really turned out to be interesting to others, inspiring someone to make their own achievements.
One of such important stories I would like to share.
I met Andrei Rymarev @andreyrymarev at a skateboard park in Fethiye.
At some point, quite unexpectedly, Andrei wrote to us and told us that he had a video project. He decided to make short documentaries about families that inspire him and may be of interest to others. He noticed our family and offered to participate in this project. So began our filming days and our participation in Where Art Begins.
I won't write much about the process. I can only say that it was very exciting, unusual and inspiring. We are immensely grateful to Andrei for drawing our attention and inviting us to participate.
Now it is the best memory of a time that changed everything.
The film can be viewed at the link:
/watch?v=ELfuqPHUkw0
Recently, I’ve been asked a few times how I met @pavelripley and how I ended up at @odd.works I think I’ve mentioned it before, but it feels like a good moment to revisit the story — especially since Pasha is launching a new round of his course “Reflection in Design. Visual Diary.”
That’s exactly where we met.
Before the course, I had been following his Instagram for a while — saving collages and typographic pieces, collecting them into a reference folder for snowboard graphics. His visual language really resonated with me: attention to detail, micro typography, slightly strange compositions. It all translated perfectly into board design, adding that extra layer you can’t fully explain but can definitely feel.
The funny part is — at that time I didn’t even think about who was behind those works. I was just collecting. Only later I randomly came across the course announcement on @werkstatt.school read about Pasha, and signed up imm
Pasha has a very unique ability to “transmit” his state. You quickly get infected by this sensitivity to form, process, and accidental discoveries. And when he flips through his sketchbooks and comments on them — it’s almost like ASMR. Be careful, it’s very easy to get stuck there for hours.
The course itself is less about skills and more about inner research. It’s about observation, documentation, and trying to understand what’s happening to you through a visual language. In many ways, it resonates with how I work with my own students now.
It feels like in a world of polished and impersonal visuals, we’re missing something more human — rough, strange, imperfect. And Pasha not only works in that space but also explains how to get there without any magic or mystification.
For me, design давно moved beyond being just a service. It became a way of reflection — on the environment, on myself, on everything around. And in that sense, this course was a very precise hit.
(As a side note — one of my projects during the course was a modular typeface that later became part of a @Terro Snowboards model for the upcoming season.)
Now Pasha is opening a new class — a great chance to meet him in person and maybe cat
#reflection #observation
In the film Inception there is a line that keeps coming back to me. The character played by Leonardo DiCaprio says: “What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? No. An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate.”
In the movie this thought is about planting an idea in someone else's mind.
In education something very similar happens. We don’t just implant ideas.
We create conditions where they can appear. Sometimes it happens right in the classroom — in a conversation, a random remark, someone else’s project, an unexpected association. And suddenly something clicks.
A small seed of an idea appears.
At first uncertain, almost accidental.
But if it truly resonates — it begins to grow. A student keeps thinking about it on the way home. Collects references.
Redraws sketches. Wakes up with a new thought about the project. At some point it becomes clear: the process has already started. Ideas behave like living organisms. They capture attention, reshape thinking and eventually begin to shape form. Recently, during a preview of student type design projects, I saw this moment again. When the idea of a typeface appears, everything else slowly starts to align around it: principle, character, rhythm, construction, system.
Form comes later. The thought always comes first. And if the idea is strong enough — it becomes almost impossible to stop.
I believe good education is not about transferring knowledge. It’s about infecting people with resonant ideas.
#designeducation #designthinking #typedesign #typedesign #typography #graphicdesign #visualresearch #creativeeducation #designprocess #designstudents #typestudies #typeexperiments #visualthinking #designstudio #designpractice
I see many beautiful finished typefaces. But I see even more long, mesmerizing processes behind them. That’s where the most interesting things happen — not fully finished, not overly polished, not too confident in their own “correctness.”
We’ve become used to showing only version 1.0 — as if nothing existed before it.
But the most alive typographic decisions are not born in the final stage. They are born in search. In doubt. In the unfinished. That’s why I’m launching .noddef — an open typographic ecosystem for typefaces that don’t have to be perfect.
This is not a fast-food marketplace. And not an archive of student exercises. It’s a space for type with character — drafts, experiments, fragments, potential. Some of the fonts will be available for free download for personal use. Some may evolve further. And some are already ready for more serious projects.
If you have a typeface or a draft you never released — maybe it just needed the right environment.
.noddef is not about serious relationships. It’s about first sincerity. And falling in love. The submission form is now open — link in bio.
#noddef #typeinprogress #experimentaltype #typedesign #fontdesign #typecommunity #typeculture #letterforms #designprocess #independenttype #emergingtyper
As someone once said,
“A designer stops being a designer the moment they step away from the machine.”
Chairs built from letters.
Cubes assembled from intersecting modules.
Laser-cut objects.
Wooden forms where texture matters more than the render.
Snowsurfs that begin as a study of form and only later become sports equipment.
For me, it was never enough to imagine a form.
I need to build it.
To experience it through material.
To test it against resistance.
Over the past few years, these experiments lived in fragments —
in friends’ workshops,
in classrooms,
in rented corners of production spaces,
between branding deadlines.
It feels like time to bring everything together.
Very soon, a new place will appear (@puhto.dev ) —
a space where I can fully return to material, modularity, and objects.
There will be:
— custom snowsurfs
— a conceptual series of furniture and jewelry objects under Popova Modular
— design objects for kids
— typographic rulers for students and anyone who loves modular design
— experiments, collaborations, joint projects
And what matters most to me — the workshop will grow in close dialogue with HSE.
Because education and production should not exist separately.
An idea must pass through the hands.
Coming soon.
#reflection #process
Urban research doesn’t start with form.
And it doesn’t start with type.
It starts with attention.
The first fragments are always fragile and uncertain:
random lines, broken rhythms, strange connections —
attempts to catch the city, to feel its plasticity.
We enter everyday space without a clear goal.
We simply tune our focus:
to look, to notice, to record.
And the city begins to respond.
Gradually, fragments stop being random.
Patterns begin to emerge:
— recurring angles,
— tense intersections,
— ruptures and connections,
— an unstable balance between rigid and fluid.
At this point, research of external space transforms into an internal language.
What was “out there” becomes “mine”.
This process is close to how early video artists worked —
Nam June Paik and his contemporaries.
The camera was not a tool of documentation,
but a way of attuning to reality.
The screen became an extension of perception.
Noise, errors, glitches — not obstacles, but aesthetic signals.
Something similar happens here.
Type stops being an object.
It becomes a consequence of attention.
#visualresearch #urbanresearch #attention
#typeexploration #typographyprocess #experimentaltype
#graphicdesign #designeducation #visualthinking
#cityastext #processoverresult
#cyrillictype #typeandcity #visualculture
Routee - type project by Arseniy Melnikov — an exploration of system, marginality and attention to detail. About the city as a field of unconscious observation and about how accidental urban structures become a strict typographic language.
Arseniy doesn’t follow a fixed visual strategy. Instead, he trusts intuition and walks the city, noticing what usually slips through attention: manholes, cracks, working marks, tags, rust, dirt, broken surfaces, random inscriptions, concrete textures, grey rhythms, marginal traces of everyday life. He’s drawn not to “beauty”, but to honesty, roughness and precision.
During the research, he collected around 900 photographs, narrowed them down to 377, and then distilled about 12 visual directions that could shape the future type system. The final reference unexpectedly became a parking movement scheme — a purely utilitarian urban object hiding a clear logic, rhythm and repetition.
The typeface is built on a modular system: 14 modules in total, with only two forming the core structure — the top and bottom parts of the circular movement scheme. Their combinations allow more than 140 variations, all glyphs fitting into a shared grid, where the whole alphabet can be seen as an overlay of all forms.
The letter “O” became the reference form — defining the plastic logic of the entire typeface. Horizontal strokes transform into semi-oval shapes, extended elements and distinctive diacritics appear, and diagonals support the rhythmic tension. Vowels gain an additional “horn” where readability allows it.
What makes this project compelling is how a chaotic urban environment transforms into a disciplined, almost ascetic system. How attention to the rough and marginal unexpectedly leads to elegance. And how strict structure doesn’t suppress vitality, but reveals it.
#typedesign #typography #experimentaltype #studentwork #graphicdesign
#visualresearch #modulartype #urbaninspiration #cyrillictype
#typeprocess #letterforms #designeducation #typeexploration
#visualsystems #gridbaseddesign #contemporarytype #hse #hseartanddesignschool
CHEKUSHI — a modular typeface by Dayana Veselskaya
The project starts with noticing what usually goes unseen: sounds, textures, small coincidences, fragments of the urban environment. Attention is scattered across everyday details, gradually forming a personal visual archive.
The key visual trigger was a found object — a brand new road sign, not yet in use, wrapped in plastic and covered with tape. Although the sign already exists as part of the navigation system, it is still inactive. Its temporary shell creates a new layer of graphics on top of the original design. Dayana began discovering letterforms in the intersections of the tape lines.
The name CHEKUSHI refers to a district of Vasilyevsky Island where this visual motif was found — both a discovered place and a discovered word.
The typeface is built on a modular system of simple geometric elements. The forms aim for clarity, balance, and grid logic, while preserving a sense of hand-made assembly, randomness, and lively rhythm. Alternate glyphs capture variations and small visual “glitches” inside the system.
CHEKUSHI is a display typeface for posters, zines, identity systems, and experimental layouts where modularity, density, and character matter. It supports Cyrillic and Latin scripts, numerals, symbols, and alternate forms.
The project explores a transitional state — when an object or a sign has not yet fully entered its function, but already creates its own visual language.
#typedesign #typeface #modulartype #experimentaltype #studenttype #cyrillictype #latinotype #graphicdesign #visualresearch #typeinspiration #letterdesign #fontdesign #designeducation #typeandcity #editorialdesign #zinedesign #visualidentity #contemporarytype #urbaninspiration #foundtypography
Hvoja — a typeface about attention by Diana Prokofieva.
About the sound of water and the rustle of leaves. About the crunch of twigs underfoot and the wind in the treetops.
About learning how to look — at water, mountains, random fragments of the city, at what usually slips past unnoticed.
This typeface grew out of the habit of noticing small things. Out of photography as a way to slow down, capture a moment and preserve it. Random frames, fragments of space and imperfect breaks of form come together in a rhythm that avoids strict symmetry and instead feels alive and breathing.
hvoja is an attempt to translate the logic of nature into typography: irregularity, soft transitions, a sense of growth and organic movement. Like a branch that never repeats itself, yet always remains recognizable.
What matters here is not the demonstration of form, but a state: calmness, warmth, comfort, sincerity. The same feeling that appears in quiet walks, moments with close people and accidental discoveries from which something new is born.
Specifications:
The typeface includes two styles (narrow / wide), supports Cyrillic and Latin, and contains a basic set of characters and numerals. Suitable for atmospheric projects, editorial layouts, posters, visual research and author-driven design, where rhythm, pauses and a sense of living form are essential.
#typedesign #typeinuse #cyrillictype #latinotype #experimentaltype
#типографика #шрифт #шрифтовойдизайн #дизайншрифта #графическийдизайн
#visualresearch #designstudents #typefamily #lettering #editorialdesign
#natureinspired #organicdesign #designprocess #typographyinspiration
What better way to spend the winter holidays than diving into another type experiment?
My kids got a Pentamimo set — a tangram-like game where every shape is built from exactly five equal squares. That constraint instantly caught my attention, and I decided to turn it into a modular playful typeface: simple, uppercase, no punctuation — a pure form experiment.
But the real discovery was color. In the game, rhythm and mood are created through color combinations, and I started wondering: can color work the same way inside a type system? Not just decorative, but structural — part of the logic.
Then came the questions, scripts, pseudo-random behavior in Glyphs, lots of testing with alternates, and attempts to avoid placing the same colors next to each other. At some point it feels less like kerning and more like assembling ligatures and scripted combinations.
For now, it’s pure research — but already a fun and very useful way to stretch typographic thinking. Curious to see where this grows next
#typedesign #typeexperiment #colorfont #modulartype #typeprocess #fontdesign #typeexploration #glyphsapp #typeeducation #designresearch #playfultypography #graphicdesign #visualexperiments #typographylover
#typecommunity #letteringdesign #creativecoding #designpractice #typeculture #experimentaltype
