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.

Range Serif is a sharp, contemporary, wedge serif typeface with just a hint of fraktur influence. There are five weights from light to black, each with corresponding italics. This is a typeface designed for demanding typographic work; it’s legible at small sizes, but unique at display sizes. There is an abundance of OpenType features in each font, including: Ligatures - all fonts contain standard f-ligatures. Contextual Alternates - Range Serif has been carefully designed to not ‘need’ ligatures. If you choose to deactivate them, the contextual alternates feature will make sure an alternative f is used before certain letters to avoid clashing. Fractions - When activated, numbers separated by a slash will automagically turn into fractions. Numerals - There are many different figure sets. These are Proportional Lining, Tabular Lining, Proportional Oldstyle, Tabular Oldstyle, Superiors and Scientific Inferiors. A slashed zero feature is also included. Small Caps - All styles include small caps, for both small caps and capitals to small caps functions. Ornaments - For convenience, the arrows are grouped in the ornaments feature. Case Sensitive Forms - There are different punctuation and bracket glyphs for all caps usage. Stylistic Alternates / SS01 - The italic fonts contain alternates for the letters A, K, R, U and X. Range Serif is a versatile and fully-featured typeface, ideal for corporate identities, contemporary art catalogs, even t-shirt slogans. The language coverage is impressive (Latin Extended A is fully covered) so Range Serif should prove a useful text and display workhorse for speakers of many different tongues. The typeface includes an array of currency symbols, including the new symbols for Indian Rupee and Turkish Lira. Also check out the accompanying sans serif version, Range Sans.

The ornamental ribbons come from our research at the 1490 font style of the 1882 George Bruce’s rare catalogue, from Intellecta’s collection of rare books and catalogues. The type here used to compound the work is the GrasVibertTwo from Intellecta.

An ultra black blackletter, Avebury Black and Avebury Inline were inspired by an early blackletter from the Caslon Foundry. Early blackletters from the Bruce Type Foundry are also reflected in this slightly modernized and more readable typeface. Caution. For display only.

Display Dots Two Serif is a display font not intended for text use. It, along with its sans counterpart were designed specifically for display, headline, logotype, branding, and similar applications. Display Dots Two Serif has an uppercase alphabet, numbers, and punctuation.

Lakeland JNL was inspired by lettering seen on a vintage container of Yankee brand motor oil. Originally all-caps on the package, the remaining characters were developed to expand on this casual semi-script design which was popular during the 1940s.

The Brazilian illustrator, Flavio Morais, devised this amusing display alphabet to have his own font for his former website. We helped to digitalize it and encouraged him to complete it with a series of “chiringuito” drawings. More about his work here.

I used a technical pen to the trace the letters in an alphabet learning book for this font. Of course, I drew several letters by freehand as if I were practicing, and included all of them together as a Stylistic Set.

Based on one of the earliest Tuscans, from Thorowgood's foundry. The original was very poorly rendered in 1822, but keep in mind that decorative types were still quite new in the early 1800s. We redrew it, but kept it recognizable.

Based on the Batman logo, this font (and a medium weight which is unreleased) were designed especially for Rian Hughes' "Batman: Black and White" comic book. It retains the signature reversed-stress weight distribution, seen to best effect on the A.

Introducing Thitheri – the font that's here to infuse your creative projects with a delightful '70s retro charm! Thitheri also includes a unique set of 26 special alternates. These alternates provide you with even more creative freedom and versatility for your projects.

Banners, arrows with numbers, cartoon cuts, decorative elements and ad helpers make up the assortment of classic images found in Printers Choice JNL. Each were carefully re-drawn from vintage sources to offer a wide variety of topics and uses.

Happy arila Hello, I made two handwritten fonts, one with thickness and can be used for whatever you are working on clarifying what you want to display, and a smooth script font is also here to make your work be sweeter

Ambie Skratch was inspired by grudge fonts, as well as rock music, and deconstructed art work. It was made by shacking a sharpie marker in a fast angled motion. Then these images were scanned and altered further on the computer.

The two font families, DemiTasse and Espresso, are designed to work together. Espresso is related to DemiTasse in that it is an italic font. They are both based on my own calligraphy and were used as such both separately and together.

Tenison is a semi-formal script which echoes the way the designer was taught to write in school. It is not overly decorative and it is highly legible. All lowercase characters link with each other, just as we were taught.

Liquida is a decorative script font with slanted inclination. All characters were designed with brush and walnut ink on paper using real ink drops to generate a trickling effect. A display typeface perfect to set a refreshing liquified lettering in seconds!

GretchenHello is a typeface family of informal hand printing that looks as if it were done with a calligraphic pen. It has tall ascenders and long descenders that give it a certain elegance. The family has three weights, each with italics.

Adhesive Letters JNL was drawn from sample letters and numbers once manufactured by the Tablet and Ticket Company of Chicago. Originally sold under the brand name of Willson's, these gummed letters were available in a number of styles and sizes.

This quirky script is packed with features. Best of all: Optical sizes! The three style family is based on the writing of calligrapher Natascha Safarik. All glyphs were redrawn manually to produce vector shapes that look perfect in literally every size!

In the days of wood type, suppliers offered words such as 'and', 'at', 'for', 'each' and numerous others as stock cuts called "catch words". This collection of twenty-six were re-drawn using a vintage type catalog page as a model.

Summer's almost here, so it's time for some mango smoothies! Mango Smoothie is a tall, all caps, hand drawn font. A little shaky, a little uneven, but with a big taste and some creamy glyphs. Comes with multi-language support.

Santino is a rounded monoline, post-bauhaus geometric font with smooth extremes and a touch of modern sensuality. It is named after Ariel "Negro" Di Lisio's son. The fonts were designed by Ariel Di Lisio and digitized by Alejandro Paul.

This face was designed in 1925 as the Monotype answer to the very popular Cooper Black. Goudy is also quite similar in appearance to Ludlow Black and Pabst Extra Bold, both of which were also done in response to Cooper Black.

Oracle Bone is a font showing ancient glyphs which were used long ago for divination in China. In Chinese this oracle bone script is called "pinyin". Oracle Bone is a latin font with a pinyin glyph in place of each letter.

Disclover came about when I was doodling on a pad of paper. I was thinking about contemporary font designs, and disclover came to mind. The original sketches were scanned and then re-drawn in Illustrator. The name is just made up.

Display Dots Two Sans is a display font not intended for text use. It, along with its serif counterpart were designed specifically for display, headline, logotype, branding, and similar applications. Display Dots Two Sans has an uppercase alphabet, numbers, and punctuation.

The Vadstenakursiv font was inspired by letterforms first used in the Vadstena nunnery, Sweden, founded by Birgitta, later canonized Saint Birgitta and buried in Rome 1373. These letterforms were also used in documents for different guilds, and on commercial documents.

Issued from the Haddon Foundry in England. Most of their original faces had names beginning with H, like their own name. Some of their types were designed by Phil May, but we cannot guarantee that this is one of them.

Courant means "newspaper". Courant font was modeled on 17th century Dutch newspapers and most of the glyphs are authentic. The 'modern' glyphs, like @, $, €, * and several others have been designed by me, as they were not in use in the 1600's.

The typeface was designed at ParaType (ParaGraph) in 1991 by Vladimir Yefimov. Based on Anons by Gennady Baryshnikov. An extra condensed sans serif. For use in advertising and display typography. The decorative styles were added in 1997 by Alexander Tarbeev.

From an old wood type owned by a San Francisco printer. Wood types were customarily given somewhat generic names (Antique Tuscan) or, more frequently, numbers to identify them. Our clients liked colorful, easily-remembered names better, and so did we.

This popular type was manufactured by the Crescent Type Foundry of Chicago and sold on their behalf by a half dozen other foundries. Introduced in the early 1890s, just as tastes were swinging away from the excesses of the Victorian period.

This font is the younger sister of HexBraille with which it may be combined to create new patterns. This also explains why their introductory text are similar. Introduction The purpose of this monospace font is to display braille in an original and "steganographic" way. The Kernig prefix means "Robust" in German, this is because of the crank shapes . The core of the glyph design is a flat hexagon which can be read as 3 rows of 2 dots (i.e. regular braille glyph grid). Even if within a glyph, braille dots ("square dots" indeed) are placed on the vertices of a flat hexagon, the difference with HexBraille is that edges connecting vertices are not straight lines but "crank shapes" instead. This can be summarized by saying that the whole glyph is a Hexcrank (a flat hexagon where vertice pairs are connected by a crank shape) NB: The initial design is illustrated by glyphs 'ç' (no dot) and 'û' (6 dots) as shown by poster 6. A. "Kernig Lattice" In KernigBraille, glyphs are connected to each other, thus for each Hexcrank glyph there are 6 connections: 2 on left/right and 4 on top/bottom. In the final design some cranks were removed for esthetical reason (i.e. leave empty space for allowing patterns diversity). In summary, a text using this font won't display a honeycomb but a lattice instead. NB: Please notice that in order to obtain the lattice without vertical gaps, you must set the interline to 0. The lattice is made from 3 kind of shapes: a.1. Hexcrank a.2. Square a.3. Irregular cross (mostly unclosed) The design favored squares over crosses. The whole slightly resembling a PCB. B. Text Frames It's possible to frame the text with 4 sets of frame glyphs (as illustrated by poster 2) b.1. Kernig { € ° £ µ § ¥ ~ ¢ } b.2. Rectangular-High { è é ê ï î à â ä } b.3. Rectangular-Low { Â ù Ä Ê Ë Ô õ ö } b.4. Mixed Kernig+High: a mix of Kernig and Rectangular-High frame glyphs When using frame glyphs, it is advised to show Pilcrow (¶) and Non Breaking Space, which are replaced by empty shapes in this font (e.g. in Microsoft Word, use CTRL+8 or use [¶] button in the ribbon).

Nyala is an Ethiopic font designed by John Hudson and Geraldine Wade. The Nyala font features Ethiopic harmonized with Latin characters for bilingual documents. The Nyala typeface is named for the Mountain Nyala, a native antelope found in the mountains of Ethiopia. The Ethiopic characters in the Nyala font were designed by John Hudson based on initial drawings by Geraldine Wade. The Latin characters in Nyala were designed by John Hudson to be in harmony with the Ethiopic characters. The Nyala font supports Ethiopic, Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre, and also other modern tongues of Ethiopia and Eritrea including Ge'ez - the ancient scriptural language. View Nyala Type Specimen (PDF)

Orbi Sans was designed as an extension of the font system Orbi released on the end of 2010. It’s a low contrast humanist sans serif of open design with the elements of dynamic nature that inherited from Orbi its elegance and clearness. The faces were coordinated with Orbi on metrics, proportions, weights, and design features. Orbi Sans consists of 4 roman weights with corresponding true italics. It can be used together with Orbi and separately. Due to wide variety of styles the family is very good for books, periodicals, and business papers. The fonts were designed by Natalia Vasilyeva. Released by ParaType in 2011.

Vintage sheet music was initially a partial inspiration for what started out as a simple retro typeface, but the basic hand-lettered design from the Art Deco era lent itself to some further experimentation. Geometric shapes were added to the original monoline letters and numerals and the end result was a marvelous display face called Cafe Society JNL. During the 1930s, "Cafe Society" was popular slang for the financially privileged during the Great Depression who dined at fine cafes while others who were able to eat out did so at diners and cafeterias. Available along with Cafe Society JNL is the original version, Cafe Society Monoline JNL.

When teaching font-making at the Art Institute of Tucson, I give my students plenty of lab time to come up with design ideas. I designed Pucky while one class created their fonts. It came about through an idea for a capital A: sort of a triangle with two round sides and a crossbar formed by a circle falling out. (You can see it here.) In drawing that, I hit upon the idea of making the tops of the alphabet sharp and square and the bottoms rounded. (See the whole alphabet here.) Pucky suggests both circus and psychedelia. Hmmmm, does anybody have an “in” at Cirque du Soleil?

Birch was designed in 1990 by Kim Buker Chansler, who based her forms on the designs of the turn of the 20th century. The new age needed new typefaces for an ever-increasing commerce and its advertisements. This time period therefore saw a profusion of new typefaces, all of which were meant first and foremost to catch the eye of consumers. To this end, style elements of past ages were reused, changed, and combined. Birch is modelled after a woodtype, a style made famous by its use on wanted posters in western movies. The narrow and space-saving Birch is perfect for headlines in display point sizes.