TA Bankslab graphic presentation at Behance The building of the Northern Bank of St. Petersburg's Baku branch was built in 1903-1905. It was the first Art Nouveau-style building in Baku, Azerbaijan. Later the bank was transformed into the Russian-Asian Bank. After the oil boom in Baku in the 19th century, branches of many banks and new banks were opened in the city. The branch of the Northern Bank of St. Petersburg was among the first banks that was opened in Baku. N.Bayev was the architect of the building for the branch of the Northern Bank of St. Petersburg located at Gorchakovskaya 3 in 1903-1905. The building currently houses the Central Branch of the International Bank of Azerbaijan. My purpose in writing this is not to copy and paste the information from Wikipedia. What attracted me to the building was the word "Банкъ" (Bank) written in Cyrillic letters, which was also used in Azerbaijan during the Soviet era. The exact date of the writing is not known. Every time I pass by this building, I always thought of creating a font of this writing someday. I had taken a photo of the building and saved it on my phone. I did a lot of research on the font and asked a lot of people. However, some did not provide information at all and some said they did not have any information. I was interested in the history of this font but I do not know if this font really existed or it was created by the architect out of nowhere. If there was such a history of this font, I wanted to recreate this font and make it available. If not, I had to create it from scratch in the same way, using only existing letters on the building. Finally, I made up my mind and decided to develop the font with all letters I have got. It was difficult to create a font based on the word, Банкъ. Because in the appearance of the letters, the midline of the letters on A, H, K was very distinct, both in the form of inclination and in more precise degrees. The serif part of the letters, the height of the upper and lower sides, differed from each other. I don't know whether it was done this way when the building was constructed or it happened over time. I prepared and kept the initial version of the font. I took a break for a while. I started digging on the story of the font again. Meanwhile, I was researching and got inspired by similar fonts. Unfortunately, my research on the font's history did not yield any results. I decided to continue finishing up the font. After developing the demo, I created the font by keeping certain parts of these differences in the letters. In addition, I had to consider the development of letters in the Cyrillic, as well as the Latin alphabet, over the past period. Thus, I began to look at the appearance of slab-serif or serif fonts of that time. In general, as I gain more experience in developing fonts, I try to focus on the precision of the design for each font. In recent years, I specifically paid attention to this matter. YouTube channel and articles by Alexandra K.'s of ParaType, as well as, information and samples from TypeType and Fontfabric studios on the Cyrillic alphabet were quite useful. I gathered data regarding the Latin alphabet from various credible sources. I do not know if I could accomplish what I aimed at but I know one thing that I could develop the font. Maybe someday I'll have to revise this font. For now, I share it with you. I created the font in 10 styles. 7 weight from Thin to Extra Black, an Outline, Shadow, and Art Nouveau. The Art Nouveau style was inspired by the texture in the background used for the text on the building. The texture I applied to capital letters adds beauty to the font. If you like the font feel free to use it or simply let me know if your current alphabet doesn't support this font.

Dom Loves Mary has a baby brother! Check out Fratello Nick here: http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/correspondence-ink/fratello-nick/ The DomLovesMary font family has all you need to create unique, custom stationery products. THE INSPIRATION BEHIND THE DOMLOVESMARY FONT FAMILY: DomLovesMary is named in memory of Dominic and Mary Sementelli, Debi’s in-laws. Dom and Mary were opposites who were truly “made for each other”. A snazzy dresser, Mary was feisty, loved to dance, sing, and be the life of the party. Dom was cool, calm and collected and was happy to shine the spotlight on the love of his life. They balanced each other out in a really great way. Going through some of her in-laws old photos, Debi found their wedding album. She was struck by the beautiful look on their faces as they got ready to start their life together. She saw the excitement, joy and anticipation of them envisioning “Una Bella Vita!” (A beautiful life!) She decided to create a hand-lettered font with them in mind represented by two totally different lettering styles that were, like Dom and Mary, “made for each other”. It’s her way of honoring them and sharing their beautiful life with all of the couples just starting theirs together. They truly had “Una Bella Vita” and we hope you do too. WHAT'S UNIQUE ABOUT THE DOMLOVESMARY FONT FAMILY: The SCRIPT & TEXT FONTS are lettering styles that were made to compliment each other. With a vintage, classic feel, they will add elegance to your design, while the TEXT serves to offer support with easy to read simplicity. In addition to the standard character set, each of the uniquely styled script fonts includes a collection of flourished ornaments. Use them to create corners, headers or other embellishments to complete the look. And if you really want to fancy things up, we offer two sets of 72 additional flourishes that were specifically made to add to upper and lower case letters for easy customization. Dress them up with one, two or more. It’s like choosing simple pearls or piling on the glitz! Or combine several to create unique flourished ornaments of your own. To add even more panache, we're pleased to present our ready made set of most frequently used ADD-ON WORDS. Created with the wedding client in mind, this set of 66 includes envelope friendly titles: Mr and Mrs, Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms, Doctor, the Doctors, as well as words to fill out your invitation suite: RSVP, Respond, Save the Date, Accommodations, Directions and more! Easily create Bride and Groom signs or Thank You cards or tags with the click of a key. Or use angled words like “and, at, to, on, for, from and of” to add a special touch to your large groups of copy. PACKAGES: We are pleased to have a variety of customers. From professional invitation designers to DIY brides, publishing companies and website / blog designers among others. So we've created packages to help fit their diverse needs. Purchase just one of our beautiful DomLovesMary SCRIPT fonts, each with its collection of included flourishes or the PRO VERSION complete with ALL THREE script fonts and a combined total of over 100 flourished ornaments. Add our TEXT font, a set of FLOURISHES or ADD-ON WORDS. Love the idea of customizing your letters with all the possible combinations? We offer a special price when you purchase both sets of flourishes. Or choose our Accoutrements Package containing both sets of FLOURISHES for letter customization as well as our ADD-ON WORDS. Want to have it all? The “DomLovesMary Total Design” package is for you. Each of these packages are offered at a 25% savings. WHAT PROGRAM WILL YOU USE?: All of the font options come in both Pro and Standard format fonts. For those with programs that can take advantage of OpenType features (click on the link to see if the program your using is one of them) the Pro fonts are for you. http://www.typotheque.com/fonts/opentype_feature_support/ For others without the ability to use Open Type features, we provide all of the script fonts that comprise the Pro Version as separate versions (Regular, Contextual and Stylistic). If you are using a program like Microsoft Word, and want all three script fonts, you can still purchase the Pro Version (a $50.00 savings), and install the individual fonts bundled in the Standard Fonts folder. We have set it up so they will appear separately as DomLovesMary, DomLovesMary Contextual and DomLovesMary Stylistic in your fonts list. Exciting news! In an effort to help our customers access all the goodies that are normally only available in Open Type Capable programs (like the flourished ornaments that come with our script fonts), we have found a simple application that allows you to do just that. For this reason, we've made sure to unicode all of our characters and glyphs so that they will work in this type of program. There may be others, but we checked this one out and found that it works. Check out PopChar

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.

The concept of the Baroque Roman type face is something which is remote from us. Ungrateful theorists gave Baroque type faces the ill-sounding attribute "Transitional", as if the Baroque Roman type face wilfully diverted from the tradition and at the same time did not manage to mature. This "transition" was originally meant as an intermediate stage between the Aldine/Garamond Roman face of the Renaissance, and its modern counterpart, as represented by Bodoni or Didot. Otherwise there was also a "transition" from a slanted axis of the shadow to a perpendicular one. What a petty detail led to the pejorative designation of Baroque type faces! If a bookseller were to tell his customers that they are about to choose a book which is set in some sort of transitional type face, he would probably go bust. After all, a reader, for his money, would not put up with some typographical experimentation. He wants to read a book without losing his eyesight while doing so. Nevertheless, it was Baroque typography which gave the world the most legible type faces. In those days the craft of punch-cutting was gradually separating itself from that of book-printing, but also from publishing and bookselling. Previously all these activities could be performed by a single person. The punch-cutter, who at that time was already fully occupied with the production of letters, achieved better results than he would have achieved if his creative talents were to be diffused in a printing office or a bookseller's shop. Thus it was possible that for example the printer John Baskerville did not cut a single letter in his entire lifetime, for he used the services of the accomplished punch-cutter John Handy. It became the custom that one type founder supplied type to multiple printing offices, so that the same type faces appeared in various parts of the world. The type face was losing its national character. In the Renaissance period it is still quite easy to distinguish for example a French Roman type face from a Venetian one; in the Baroque period this could be achieved only with great difficulties. Imagination and variety of shapes, which so far have been reserved only to the fine arts, now come into play. Thanks to technological progress, book printers are now able to reproduce hairstrokes and imitate calligraphic type faces. Scripts and elaborate ornaments are no longer the privilege of copper-engravers. Also the appearance of the basic, body design is slowly undergoing a change. The Renaissance canonical stiffness is now replaced with colour and contrast. The page of the book is suddenly darker, its lay-out more varied and its lines more compact. For Baroque type designers made a simple, yet ingenious discovery - they enlarged the x-height and reduced the ascenders to the cap-height. The type face thus became seemingly larger, and hence more legible, but at the same time more economical in composition; the type area was increasing to the detriment of the margins. Paper was expensive, and the aim of all the publishers was, therefore, to sell as many ideas in as small a book block as possible. A narrowed, bold majuscule, designed for use on the title page, appeared for the first time in the Late Baroque period. Also the title page was laid out with the highest possible economy. It comprised as a rule the brief contents of the book and the address of the bookseller, i.e. roughly that which is now placed on the flaps and in the imprint lines. Bold upper-case letters in the first line dramatically give way to the more subtle italics, the third line is highlighted with vermilion; a few words set in lower-case letters are scattered in-between, and then vermilion appears again. Somewhere in the middle there is an ornament, a monogram or an engraving as a kind of climax of the drama, while at the foot of the title-page all this din is quietened by a line with the name of the printer and the year expressed in Roman numerals, set in 8-point body size. Every Baroque title-page could well pass muster as a striking poster. The pride of every book printer was the publication of a type specimen book - a typographical manual. Among these manuals the one published by Fournier stands out - also as regards the selection of the texts for the specimen type matter. It reveals the scope of knowledge and education of the master typographers of that period. The same Fournier established a system of typographical measurement which, revised by Didot, is still used today. Baskerville introduced the smoothing of paper by a hot steel roller, in order that he could print astonishingly sharp letters, etc. ... In other words - Baroque typography deserves anything else but the attribute "transitional". In the first half of the 18th century, besides persons whose names are prominent and well-known up to the present, as was Caslon, there were many type founders who did not manage to publish their manuals or forgot to become famous in some other way. They often imitated the type faces of their more experienced contemporaries, but many of them arrived at a quite strange, even weird originality, which ran completely outside the mainstream of typographical art. The prints from which we have drawn inspiration for these six digital designs come from Paris, Vienna and Prague, from the period around 1750. The transcription of letters in their intact form is our firm principle. Does it mean, therefore, that the task of the digital restorer is to copy meticulously the outline of the letter with all inadequacies of the particular imprint? No. The type face should not to evoke the rustic atmosphere of letterpress after printing, but to analyze the appearance of the punches before they are imprinted. It is also necessary to take account of the size of the type face and to avoid excessive enlargement or reduction. Let us keep in mind that every size requires its own design. The longer we work on the computer where a change in size is child's play, the more we are convinced that the appearance of a letter is tied to its proportions, and therefore, to a fixed size. We are also aware of the fact that the computer is a straightjacket of the type face and that the dictate of mathematical vectors effectively kills any hint of naturalness. That is why we strive to preserve in these six alphabets the numerous anomalies to which later no type designer ever returned due to their obvious eccentricity. Please accept this PostScript study as an attempt (possibly futile, possibly inspirational) to brush up the warm magic of Baroque prints. Hopefully it will give pleasure in today's modern type designer's nihilism.