Ilya is a type and graphic designer and teacher, who lives and works in Barcelona. He is a graduate of the Moscow State University of the Printing Arts (2002), where his graduation project was done under the supervision of Alexander Tarbeev. He has a MA degree in type design from the Type & Media programme at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (2005). After completing the programme, he returned to Moscow where he has collaborated with a number of media organizations: Kommersant, Afisha, Moskovskiye Novosti, Bolshoi Gorod and Men’s Health Russia. In 2005–2007 he was art director for Afisha’s city guidebooks, and 2007–2015 he supervised the curriculum in type and typography at the British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow. He has been sought out as an expert consultant on Cyrillic type design by international foundries since 2008. In 2014 he founded the foundry CSTM Fonts with Yury Ostromentsky, and in 2016 the type.today font store with a focus on Cyrillic typefaces.