Originating in Moscow, Russia, as a part of ParaGraph International, the designers at ParaType have enjoyed a long history of multilingual type design and conversion.
Years ago, typeface development in the Soviet Union took place only within a designated cadre belonging to Polygraphmash, a state research institute that held the largest collection of Cyrillic fonts in the world. In 1998, ParaType became independent of ParaGraph, with ParaType, Ltd. remaining in Russia and ParaType Inc. being established in California. To this day, ParaType still creates and distributes their type designs through a licensing agreement with Polygraphmash.
In addition to Latin and Cyrillic fonts, ParaType has also designed Hebrew, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian, and Greek scripts. In fact, they’ve even added Cyrillic support to some of YouWorkForThem’s fonts to make them accessible to commercial clients in Russia. ParaType currently offers more than 200 fonts, an extensive and well-rounded body of work that provides designers with an impressive variety of type designs to choose from.
Kartell is an attractive serif font with gentle curves and decorative swashes that add a subtle flourish without hindering its legibility. Designed by Oleg Karpinsky in 2006, the Kartell font family has companion italics for all three weights: Light, Regular, and Bold. Whether you’re selecting a font for headlines or an entire body of text, Kartell is an absolutely beautiful font that’s legible in large and small point. This type design is equally well-suited for use on billboards, advertisements, logos, and a wide variety of other digital and print applications.
Orbi is an incredibly versatile font family designed by Natalia Vasilyeva. Orbi is comprised of ten roman font faces (Orbi, Bold, Narrow, Narrow Bold, and Black, with corresponding italics for each), three calligraphic letter sets, and three ornately decorated sets of initials. The result is a font family that can do just about anything. The decorative styles are easily at home in any whimsical print design. The gorgeous curls and leafy flourishes of Orbi Initials Three is especially beautiful in book titles or as the opening text of a paragraph within a children’s fairytale. The roman styles of this font family serve well in editorials and news websites, white papers and statistics tables, or any print or digital application that requires a clean, easily legible type design.
Circus Didot is an intriguing blend of traditional serif design with an art deco flair, designed by Danila Orlovsky. Whisper-thin arches and broad, angular parings have fostered a striking counterweight with one another, creating letterforms that demand your immediate attention. Circus Didot is an elegant choice for work in advertising design, but would also be useful in many other applications including editorials, logos, and book designs.
Bardi is an uppercase letter set whose best suited purposes are found in print or digital advertising and display, particularly in magazine spreads or logos. Designed by Manvel Shmavonyan, Bardi takes a bold, stenciled approach with a very narrow space requirement. The condensed letterforms issue a call back to magazines from decades long since passed, although that does necessarily make Bardi a retro typeface. It’s sleek and stylish, and it’s more than appropriate for modern fashion spreads.
ParaType also offers a number of dingbats sets in various styles.
Fashion Plate is a cool collection of inky model sketches designed by Arevik Shmavonyan. This collection of 129 glyphs is ideal for fashion advertising and logo design, but the figures from Fashion Plate may also be used as illustrations in other types of applications.
Petroglyph is a geometric set of drawings modeled after prehistoric rock carvings found throughout the world. Designed by Ekaterina Kulagina, Petroglyph is a fun set of dingbats for any designer working on projects that are centered around anthropology, or that perhaps require a touch of prehistoric symbolism in the design.
With more than 200 fonts available, ParaType really gives designers a lot of great stuff to work with. Visit ParaType’s portfolio to review their products and make your purchase today.
