The PARATYPE library is our latest major addition, consisting of more than 370 typefaces. In the spirit of the perestroika changes and following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a group of Russian type designers quit the state-owned Polygraphmash foundry to establish ParaType, the first, and now largest Russian digital type foundry. The ParaType team under the supervision of Vladimir Yefimov creates new typefaces and explores the Russian typographic heritage by making digital versions of existing Russian designs: these include the hits of Soviet typography such as Literaturnaya and Journal Sans. Most ParaType fonts are available in Western/Roman, Central European, Turkish and Cyrillic encodings. The Russian constructivist and avant garde movements of the early 20th century inspired many ParaType typefaces, including Rodchenko, Quadrat Grotesk, Ariergard, Unovis, Tauern, Dublon and Stroganov. The ParaType library also includes many excellent book and newspaper typefaces such as Octava, Lazurski, Bannikova, Neva or Petersburg. On the other hand, if you need a pretty face to knock your clients dead, meet the ParaType girls: Tatiana, Betina, Hortensia, Irina, Liana, Nataliscript, Nina, Olga and Vesna (also check Zhikharev who is not a girl but still very pretty). ParaType excels in adding Cyrillic characters to existing Latin typefaces — if your company is ever going to do business with Eastern Europe, we recommend you make them part of your corporate identity! ParaType created CE and Cyrillic versions of popular typefaces licensed from other foundries, including Bell Gothic, Caslon, English 157, Futura, Original Garamond, Gothic 725, Humanist 531, Kis, Raleigh, or Zapf Elliptical 711.

The courageous Russian author of the best seller Anastasia, Vladimir Megre, once said that this remarkable woman would inspire creative people around the world to produce their best work. Since I consider myself a creative person who has been deeply touched by her story, I sincerely hope that this will be true for me also. Anastasia talks a lot about God, the wonders of the natural world and how all things have been created so perfectly. This belief in universal perfection, however, is not confined to mystics alone. Many great mathematicians and scientists, including Albert Einstein, were of the same opinion. Having read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, I became quite fascinated with the so-called Fibonacci series; "a sequence of integers in which each integer (Fibonacci number) after the second is the sum of the two preceding integers; specif., the series 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, . . ." (Webster’s Dictionary). These mysterious numbers, which are said to give divine proportions, are found throughout nature in everything from a rose to a spiral galaxy. Many believe that this reinforces the argument that there is a divine intelligence back of creation. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could somehow create a font using these numbers in the design process. If I have succeeded - even partially - in attaining these mystical proportions, it will definitely have been worth all the hard work. And, I sincerely hope that many will enjoy using this font in producing their own best work.