KTF Olivier is based on a font called «Оливье» found in a book «Шрифты для художников-оформителей» («Fonts for design artists») issued in Minsk in 1979. This was a handbook for Soviet designers, featuring many fonts, most of which were drawn by the author himself, Rygor Klikushyn.

Klikushyn was an outstanding figure in Belarusian art, a multifaceted man who lived a long and interesting life. He graduated from theatre school in the late 1930s, where, among other things, he taught himself to play the piano, and was then called up to the front as a cartographer and telegrapher and fought in World War II until the end, leaving behind numerous diaries that include maps of the battles he drew. After the war, he taught at the Viciebsk Institute of Art and Graphics.

He was very interested in foreign art and always bought American and English magazines when possible. His daughter tells us that once he used a typewriter to reproduce a book by one of the unpopular foreign authors in the Soviet Union and gave copies to his acquaintances. At the time the typewriter was considered an ideological weapon, and Klikushyn was summoned to the KGB, accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and questioning his right to teach young people. He had to leave the institute and was banned from leaving the USSR until its collapse. In Klikushyn’s books (there were plenty of it through the 1970s-1990s) you can find a lot of his Cyrillic interpretations of the up-to-date Western fonts like Shotgun, Countdown, Davida, Jackson, Aki Lines among others.

The shapes of KTF Olivier remind you of the classic Gill Kayo (1932), but their differences are also what makes it hauntological to the post-Soviet eye. Olivier pays tribute to the enthusiastic redrawing and cyrillization of well-known fonts behind the iron curtain. In this way, countless no-name lettering and model alphabets were created. КТФ Олів'е Репліка is a reconstruction of such a source. Limited to Cyrillic only, it was made by Alex Chumak in 2021 for a music video by Kate NV and mastered by Yevgen Anfalov. In turn, KTF Olivier (made by Yevgen Anfalov) takes a few letters, numbers and overall proportions of it's ancestor and becomes something new. Another telephone game in the spirit of KTF, please welcome КТФ Олів'е Репліка and KTF Olivier.