Mary Bacon

Zierde is a take on early advertising, small-copy grotesks of the late 19th/early 20th century, and is largely inspired by Miller & Richards own range of Grotesques.

More importantly, Zierde is accompanied by a large set of ornaments (+200) which hark back to the look-and-feel of the early-modernist arts and crafts movement.

The ornaments in, and presentation of, Zierde owe much credit to J.G Schelter & Gieseckes 1913 type specimen book Die Zierde. The strong functional uppercase sans-serifs alongside luscious, beautiful patterns in Die Zierde make for beautiful combinations.

This early-modernist use of grotesk alongside ornament looks bizarre in the eyes of us used to seeing sans-serifs in more formal, sterile settings.

The face itself retains some historical flourishes such as the eccentric leaning angle of the italics, the long cross-bar on the G, the gammy-leg of the R, a strange ampersand and some irregular terminals across the weights.

Zierde is display face meant for headlines, titles, short-copy, labels and logos.

It comes in caps and small caps, Latin and Cyrillic.

Waba Pronounced Vah-bah, is a font family that I designed. The name comes from a historical variation on the Estonian word vaba meaning free, or at liberty.

More Back in 2017 I visited the Estonian Print & Paper Museum in Tartu to see its great collection of type (well worth a visit!).

While I was there I saw some big woodcut blocks of Reklameschrift Herold - a super Art Nouveau/Jugendstil style display font.

The Print & Paper Museums collection covers both Latin and Cyrillic faces and as a foreigner in these parts I'm kind of fascinated by the exoticism of Cyrillic.

How it is different but the same to the Latin letters I take for granted (as a humble Englander no excuses).

Not to mention, Jugendstil with its imitation of natural form, reverse-weights and looping-delicious curves (like you've left the window open all summer and the garden plants are climbing in).

This mix of Jugendstil, Cyrillic letters and the beautiful historical border town of Tartu inspired me to start drawing Waba.

Trimming the serifs from Herold, simplifying those angles and expanding the category of weights, then taking look at the magical logic of Berthold Block and doing a few things that just seemed right at the time Waba is a bit of love letter to Estonia, the Baltics and the visual history of Eastern Europe.

Waba Monogram Waba also contains a monogram face, which allows you to create any monogramming latin and cyrillic.

Simply type out your 2-3-4 characters in Waba Monogram, making sure Contextual Alternates is turned on them voila! Monograms can be customised manually using the OpenType select-pop-up in Adobe.

Also included are a few Discretionary Ligatures for Mc, De, Von etc. Monograms work best when Contextual Alternates is turned on.