Sterling Script was initially meant to a be digitization/reinterpretation of a copperplate script widely used during what effectively became the last decade of metal type: Stephenson Blake's Youthline, from 1952. The years from 1945 to 1960 saw a heightened demand for copperplate faces, due to post-war market optimism, as well as the banking and insurance industries booming like never before, which triggered the need for design elements that express formal elegance and luxury. The name Sterling Script is a tip of our hat to England, the Stephenson Blake foundry's country of origin. It is also a historical hint about copperplate scripts having been used mainly for banking and bonds in the 19th century. Originally we just wanted to resurrect a gorgeous metal type from the ashes of forgotten history. But after the main font was done we saw that the original s really needed an alternate. We made one. But we felt sorry for the original s and didn't want to see it dropped from use altogether, so we saved it by building a set of ligatures that solve the minor connection problem with the s at large sizes. Before the completion of the ligatures, a few different alternates were also drawn, and we were faced by the fact that the single font we set out to do was now a much larger set than we anticipated. While thinking about how to split up our unexpected bundle of large characters, we drew a few more alternates and some swashes. This abundance "problem" reached a certain point where there was no looking back, so we just decided to go all the way with this font. We added many more alternates, swashes, ligatures, and two full sets of each beginning and ending lowercase letter. The result is over 750 characters of sheer elegance. Sterling Script has many features that set it above and beyond other copperplate scripts: - It has 2 beginning and 2 ending alternates for every single lowercase character. The beginning and ending variants on the vowels are also available in accented form in the appropriate cells of the character map. - Sterling Script is the ultimate elegant font choice for luxury design. Very elegant, but not too soft. Its strong and confident shapes convey a message that is real, comforting and assuring. - One of the eventual purposes of expanding Sterling Script this extensively was to create a script that finds the middle ground between formal and informal without compromising either trait, a script where the degree of formality can be gauged, tweaked, cranked up or toned down depending on the layout's needs. Aside from beginnings and endings, there are multiple variations for the majority of the basic characters. This is a formal script on steroids, where twirls and swashes can be set to come out unexpectedly from any place in the word, which is great for reducing the inherent rigidity of words set in copperplate scripts and "humanizing" them whenever needed. This is especially useful for wedding, postcard and invitation design, where not every viewer of the collateral material has something to do with banking or insurance. - With such an extensive character set, a designer can easily set a word or a sentence in 10 or more different ways, and choose the perfect one for the task at hand. This is particularly useful for work where details are of utmost importance, like logos, slogans, or elegant engravings that consist of one to three words. Let those swashes and twirls intertwine for maximum elegance. The Sterling Script complete package consists of 7 fonts: Sterling Script, Alternates, Beginnings, Endings, Swashes, Swash Alternates, and Ligatures. Sterling Script is available in five different purchase options and price ranges. But with such a massive offering of variation, the Sterling Script complete package is definitely the most value-laden set in its class. Once you use Sterling Script, you will never want to go back to other copperplates.

TT Marxiana useful links: Specimen | History of creation | Graphic presentation | Customization options Please note! If you need OTF versions of the fonts, just email us at commercial@typetype.org About TT Marxiana: TT Marxiana is a project to reconstruct a set of pre-revolutionary fonts that were used in the layout of the "Niva" magazine, published by the St. Petersburg publishing house A.F. Marx. In our project, we decided to focus on a specific set of fonts that were used in the preparation and printing of the "Niva" magazine in 1887, namely its Antiqua and Italic, Grotesque and Elzevir. As part of the TT Marxiana project, we sought to adhere to strict historicity and maintain maximum proximity to the paper source. We tried to avoid any “modernization” of fonts, unless of course we consider this to be kerning work, the introduction of OpenType features and creation of manual hinting. As a result, with the TT Marxiana font family, a modern designer gets a full-fledged and functional set of different fonts, which allows using modern methods and using modern software to create, for example, a magazine in a design typical of the late 19th century. The TT Marxiana project started in the late summer of 2018 and from the very beginning went beyond the traditional projects of TypeType because of the importance of preserving the historical identity. Since up to this point, we had never before reconstructed the font from historical paper sources and with such a level of elaboration and attention to detail, it took us two years to implement this project. You can read more about all stages of the project in our blog, and here we will briefly talk about the result. As it turned out, drawing a font following the scanned pages of a century-old magazine is a very difficult task. In fact, such a font reconstruction very much resembles archaeological excavations or solving a complex cipher, and all these efforts are needed only in order to finally understand what steps need to be taken so that the resulting font is not just an antiqua, but the specific and accurate antiqua from "Niva" magazine. In addition, due to the specifics of printing, same characters in the old magazine setting looked completely different, which greatly complicated the task. In one place, there was less ink than needed, and the letter in the reference was not well-printed and thin, in some other place there was more ink and the letter had flooded. An important task was to preserve and convey this feeling of typographic printing, but at the same time it was important to identify the common logic and character of the dot gains so that the font would form a harmonious, single, but at the same time lively picture. Since the "Niva" magazine was historically published in Russian, the magazine had no shortage of references for the reconstruction of Cyrillic characters, but there were not many Latin letters in the magazine at all. In addition, the paper source lacked a part of punctuation, diacritics, there were no currency signs nor ligatures at all—we developed all these characters based on font catalogs of the 19–20 centuries, trying to reflect characteristic details from the main character composition to the max. So, for example, the Germandbls character, which is not in the original "Niva" set, we first found in one of the font catalogs, but still significantly redesigned it. We decided that in such a voluminous project, only graphic similarities with the original source are not enough and we came up with a feature that can be used to exchange modern Russian spelling for pre-revolutionary spelling. When this feature is turned on, yat and yer appear in the necessary places (i, ѣ, b, ѳ and ѵ), the endings of the words change, and so appears a complete sensation of the historical text. This feature works in all fonts of the TT Marxiana font family. TT Marxiana Antiqua is a scotch style serif, the drawing of which carefully preserved some of the artifacts obtained by printing, namely dot gain, a slight deformation of the letters and other visual nuances. TT Marxiana Antiqua has an interesting stylistic set that imitates the old setting and in which some of the signs are made with deliberate sticking or roughness. Using this set will provide an opportunity to further simulate the setting of that great time. TT Marxiana Grotesque is a rather thick and bold old grotesk. Its drawing also maximally preserved the defects obtained during printing and characteristic of its paper reference. In addition to pre-revolutionary spelling, TT Marxiana Grotesque has a decorative set with an inversion. This is a set of uppercase characters, numbers and punctuation, which allows you to type inverse headers, i.e. print white on black. As a result of using this set, you get the text against black bars—this way of displaying was very characteristic for print advertising at the turn of the century. In addition, about 30 decorative indicator stubs were drawn for this set: arrows, hands, clubs, etc. TT Marxiana Elzevir is a title or header font and is a compilation of monastic Elzevir that were actively used in the "Niva" magazine for all its prints. Unlike the antiqua, TT Marxiana Elzevir has sharper forms, and the influence of deformations from typographic printing is not as noticeable in the forms of its signs. This is primarily due to the specifics of its drawing and the fact that it was usually used as a heading font and was printed in large sizes. The height of the lowercase and uppercase characters of Elsevier is the same as the heights of the antiqua, but the font is more contrasting and lighter, it has a lot of white and, unlike the antiqua and the grotesque, there are a lot of sharp corners. An exclusive feature of the TT Marxiana Elzevir is an alternative set of uppercase characters with swash. • TT Marxiana Antiqua consist of 625 glyphs each and and it has 23 OpenType features, such as: aalt, ccmp, locl, subs, sinf, sups, numr, dnom, frac, ordn, lnum, pnum, tnum, onum, salt, calt, liga, ss01, ss02, ss03, ss04, ss05, case. • TT Marxiana Antiqua Italic consist of 586 glyphs each and and it has 22 OpenType features, such as: aalt, ccmp, locl, subs, sinf, sups, numr, dnom, frac, ordn, lnum, pnum, tnum, onum, salt, calt, liga, ss01, ss02, ss03, ss04, case. • TT Marxiana Grotesque consists of 708 glyphs and it has 22 OT features, such as: aalt, ccmp, locl, subs, sinf, sups, numr, dnom, frac, ordn, lnum, pnum, tnum, onum, salt, calt, liga, ss01, ss02, ss03, ss04, case. • TT Marxiana Elzevir consists of 780 glyphs and it has 21 OT features, such as: aalt, ccmp, locl, ordn, frac, tnum, onum, lnum, pnum, calt, ss01, ss02, ss03, ss04, ss05, ss06, salt, c2sc, smcp, case, liga. FOLLOW US: Instagram | Facebook | Website TT Marxiana language support: Acehnese, Afar, Albanian, Alsatian, Aragonese, Asu, Aymara, Banjar, Basque, Belarusian (cyr), Bemba, Bena, Betawi, Bislama, Boholano, Bosnian (cyr), Breton, Bulgarian (cyr), Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chiga, Cornish, Corsican, Cree, Danish, Dutch, Embu, English, Erzya, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Friulian, Gaelic, Galician, German, Gusii, Haitian Creole, Hiri Motu, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Interlingua, Irish, Italian, Javanese, Judaeo-Spanish, Kabuverdianu, Kalenjin, Karachay-Balkar (cyr), Kashubian, Khasi, Khvarshi, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kongo, Kumyk, Ladin, Leonese, Luganda, Luo, Luxembourgish, Luyia, Macedonian, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malagasy, Malay, Manx, Mauritian Creole, Minangkabau, Montenegrin (cyr), Mordvin-moksha, Morisyen, Nauruan, Ndebele, Nias, Nogai, Norwegian, Nyankole, Occitan, Oromo, Palauan, Polish, Portuguese, Rheto-Romance, Rohingya, Romansh, Rombo, Rundi, Russian, Rusyn, Rwa, Samburu, Sango, Sangu, Scots, Sena, Serbian (cyr), Seychellois Creole, Shambala, Shona, Soga, Somali, Sotho, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Swiss German, Tagalog, Taita, Tetum, Tok Pisin, Tsonga, Tswana, Ukrainian, Uyghur, Valencian, Volapük, Võro, Vunjo, Walloon, Xhosa, Zulu.

TT Tsars useful links: Specimen | Graphic presentation | Customization options The TT Tsars font family is a collection of serif display titling fonts that are stylized to resemble the fonts of the beginning, the middle and the end of the XVIII century. The project is based on title fonts, that is, the fonts that were used to design book title pages. The idea for the project TT Tsars was born after a small study of the historical development of the Cyrillic type and is also based on Abram Shchitsgal’s book "Russian Civil Type". At the very beginning of the project, we had developed a basic universal skeleton for the forms of all characters in all subfamilies of the family, and later on, we added styles, visual features, artifacts and other nuances typical of the given period onto the skeleton. Yes, from the historical accuracy point of view it might be that such an approach is not always justified, but we have achieved our goal and as a result, we have created perfectly combinable serifs that can be used to style an inscription for a certain time period. The TT Tsars font family consists of 20 fonts: 5 separate subfamilies, each of which consists of 4 fonts. Each font contains 580 glyphs, except for the TT Tsars E subfamily, in which each font consists of 464 characters. Instead of lowercase characters in the typeface, small capitals are used, which also suggests that the typeface is rather a display than text one. In TT Tsars you can find a large number of ligatures (for Latin and Cyrillic alphabets), arrows and many useful OpenType features, such as: frac, ordn, sinf, sups, numr, dnom, case, onum, tnum, pnum, lnum, salt (ss01), dlig. Time-related characteristics of the subfamilies are distributed as follows: • TT Tsars A—the beginning of the 18th century (Latin and Cyrillic) • TT Tsars B—the beginning of the 18th century (Latin and Cyrillic) • TT Tsars C—the middle of the 18th century (Latin and Cyrillic) • TT Tsars D—the end of the 18th century (Latin and Cyrillic) • TT Tsars E—conditionally the beginning of the 18th century (only Latin) TT Tsars A and TT Tsars B families (both the beginning of the 18th century) have different starting points: for TT Tsars A it is Latin, for TT Tsars B it is Cyrillic. The development of the TT Tsars A family began in Latin, the font is based on the royal serif Romain du Roi. The Cyrillic alphabet is harmoniously matched to the Latin. The development of the TT Tsars B family began in Cyrillic, which is based on a Russian civil type. Characteristic elements are the curved one-sided serifs of triangular characters (A, X, Y), drops appear in the letter ?, the middle strokes ? and P are adjacent to the main stroke. Latin was drawn to pair with Cyrillic. It is still based on the royal serif, but somewhat changed: the letters B and P are closed and the upper bar of the letter A rose. This was done for the visual combination of Cyrillic and Latin and at the same time to make a distinction between TT Tsars A and TT Tsars B. TT Tsars C is now the middle of the 18th century. Cyrillic alphabet itself did not stand still and evolved, and by the middle of the 18th century, its forms have changed and become to look the way they are shown in this font family. Latin forms are following the Cyrillic. The figures are also slightly modified and adapted to the type design. In TT Tsars C, Cyrillic and Latin characters are created in parallel. A distinctive feature of the Cyrillic alphabet in TT Tsars C is the residual influence of the flat pen. This is noticeable in such signs as ?, ?, K. The shape of the letters ?, ?, ?, ? is very characteristic of the period. In the Latin alphabet, a characteristic leg appears at the letter R. For both languages, there is a typical C characterized by an upper serif and the appearance of large, even somewhat bolding serifs on horizontals (T, E, ?, L). TT Tsars D is already the end of the 18th century when with the development of printing, the forms of some Cyrillic characters had changed and turned into new skeletons of letters that we transposed into Latin. The figures were also stylized. In this font, both Cyrillic and Latin are stylistically executed with different serifs and are thus logically separated. The end of the century is characterized by the reduction of decorative elements. Straight, blueprint-like legs of the letters ?, R, K, ?. Serifs are very pronounced and triangular. E and ? are one-sided on the middle horizontal line. A very characteristic C with two serifs appears in the Latin alphabet. TT Tsars E is a steampunk fantasy typeface, its theme is a Latinized Russian ?ivil type (also referred to as Grazhdansky type which emerged after Peter the Great’s language reform), which includes only the Latin alphabet. There is no historical analog to this typeface, it is exclusively our reflections on the topic of what would have happened if the civil font had developed further and received a Latin counterpart. We imagined such a situation in which the civil type was exported to Europe and began to live its own life.

The idea of a brand-new grotesk is certainly rather foolish – there are already lots of these typefaces in the world and, quite simply, nothing is more beautiful than the original Gill. The sans-serif chapter of typography is now closed by hundreds of technically perfect imitations of Syntax and Frutiger, which are, however, for the most part based on the cool din-aesthetics. The only chance, when looking for inspiration, is to go very far... A grotesk does not afford such a variety as a serif typeface, it is dull and can soon tire the eye. This is why books are not set in sans serif faces. A grotesk is, however, always welcome for expressing different degrees of emphasis, for headings, marginal notes, captions, registers, in short for any service accompaniment of a book, including its titlings. We also often come across a text in which we want to distinguish the individual speaking or writing persons by the use of different typefaces. The condition is that such grotesk should blend in perfectly with the proportions, colour and above all with the expression of the basic, serif typeface. In the area of non-fiction typography, what we appreciate in sans-serif typefaces is that they are clamorous in inscriptions and economic in the setting. John Sans is to be a modest servant and at the same time an original loudspeaker; it wishes to inhabit libraries of educated persons and to shout from billboards. A year ago we completed the transcription of the typefaces of John Baskerville, whose heritage still stands out vividly in our memory. Baskerville cleverly incorporated certain constructional elements in the design of the individual letters of his typeface. These elements include above all the alternation of softand sharp stroke endings. The frequency of these endings in the text and their rhythm produce a balanced impression. The anchoring of the letters on the surface varies and they do not look monotonous when they are read. We attempted to use these tricks also in the creation of a sans-serif typeface. Except that, if we wished to create a genuine “Baroque grotesk”, all the decorativeness of the original would have to be repeated, which would result in a parody. On the contrary, to achieve a mere contrast with the soft Baskerville it is sufficient to choose any other hard grotesk and not to take a great deal of time over designing a new one. Between these two extremes, we chose a path starting with the construction of an almost monolinear skeleton, to which the elements of Baskerville were carefully attached. After many tests of the text, however, some of the flourishes had to be removed again. Anything that is superfluous or ornamental is against the substance of a grotesk typeface. The monolinear character can be impinged upon in those places where any consistency would become a burden. The fine shading and softening is for the benefit of both legibility and aesthetics. The more marked incisions of all crotches are a characteristic feature of this typeface, especially in the bold designs. The colour of the Text, Medium and Bold designs is commensurate with their serif counterparts. The White and X-Black designs already exceed the framework of book graphics and are suitable for use in advertisements and magazines. The original concept of the italics copying faithfully Baskerville’s morphology turned out to be a blind alley. This design would restrict the independent use of the grotesk typeface. We, therefore, began to model the new italics only after the completion of the upright designs. The features which these new italics and Baskerville have in common are the angle of the slope and the softened sloped strokes of the lower case letters. There are also certain reminiscences in the details (K, k). More complicated are the signs & and @, in the case of which regard is paid to distinguishing, in the design, the upright, sloped @ small caps forms. The one-storey lower-case g and the absence of a descender in the lower-case f contributes to the open and simple expression of the design. Also the inclusion of non-aligning figures in the basic designs and of aligning figures in small caps serves the purpose of harmonization of the sans-serif families with the serif families. Non-aligning figures link up better with lower-case letters in the text. If John Sans looks like many other modern typefaces, it is just as well. It certainly is not to the detriment of a Latin typeface as a means of communication, if different typographers in different places of the world arrive in different ways at a similar result.