The TT Ricordi font family is a collection of three display heading antiquas designed to significantly diversify the traditional font palette. With that, all three fonts are close in thickness and similar in their character compositions and are featured in the uppercase set and the small capitals set, which replaces lowercase characters. The fonts have broad support of Latin languages and support basic Cyrillic.
How the idea came about
Each font from the TT Ricordi family was drawn by a separate designer and has its own story.
TT Ricordi Todi
“Historical sources are a great starting point for working on a font. Despite the fact that the forms are already defined by the original, the project can still go in completely different directions. You can make a font that will carefully preserve all its historical artifacts, or you can transform the original into something ultra-modern.
During all my trips to Italy, I have accumulated quite a few photographs of historical inscriptions, and every time I revise them, I feel the urge to make something of them. When we decided to use them in our work, we were not yet sure how much demand there would be for this concept.
After thinking about how and where such fonts could be used, we came to the conclusion that they should be conceptual and display rather than functional. Therefore, it would be much more interesting to work on several different concepts than to develop one and work towards increasing the size of the font family. And if we are talking about several different concepts, it was logical to give them to different designers. Thus, we could work on them in parallel, discuss each other’s projects together, share experiences, borrow developments, but all the same, the character of the fonts turned out to be completely different.”
Yulia Gonina, Art director
TT Ricordi Todi is a wide antiqua with a classic base and a contemporary nature. The font turned out to be refined yet sharp, and in places even pushy and aggressive. The font was drawn by Yulia, and the project was based on plaques with engraved street names from the small Italian town of Todi. The main challenge was to decipher the characteristic features of the signs and emphasize them in a modern way. In addition, it was necessary to draw a Cyrillic alphabet that would not be inferior to the Latin alphabet in its expressiveness.
The TT Ricordi Todi font has fairly wide character proportions, and there is practically no contrast in them. The main feature of the font is the combination of smooth round shapes with deliberately squared shapes. In addition, the font is characterized by crisp and sharp character details, exaggerated ascenders and descenders, and muted contrast. Among the interesting font peculiarities, you can choose between the characteristic long descenders and ascenders and their more tempered versions, you can find a stylistic set with triangular full stops, alternative versions of the EF characters and two letter F shapes, round and squared.
TT Ricordi Nobili
“My work on TT Ricordi was of course different from my usual work on our fonts, such as TT Norms® Pro 3.0. For me, this project was primarily about creativity, expressiveness of forms and display fonts. Here I was given maximum freedom in finding shapes, which was a great pleasure, but also a great challenge.”
Anna Tikhonova, Type designer
TT Ricordi Nobili is a display antiqua with a rich Roman ancestry and contemporary world views. It stands out from the crowd with its subtlety and elegance.
The font was drawn by Anya and was inspired by an inscription carved into the stone floor of a cathedral in Florence. Because people walked over the inscription, some of the letters got thinner and worn out over time. It is this feeling of disappearing or flickering elements that we wanted to capture and implement in the project.
The TT Ricordi Nobili font has a high contrast, even though the font itself is quite thin. The serifs in the font are not massive at all, but at the same time they are display serifs. There is a certain tension in the font, and the viewer perceives this tension. We can say that behind the external classic facade lies a rather modern plot. The font has a large set of discrete ligatures which allow to create interesting combinations and expand the capabilities of the font.
TT Ricordi Fulmini
“For me, the project was unusual already at the stage of technical specification. We had a limited amount of time for sketches, drawing and testing. It was very invigorating and did not allow one to fall into contemplation. The most difficult thing for me was to get away from the old style and give the font a modern feel. To do this, we had to abandon the fullness of the reference and make the font thinner and sharper.”
Marina Khodak, Senior type designer
TT Ricordi Fulmini is a fashionable contemporary antiqua firmly holding on to its historic roots. The font turned out to be like a thistle flower: bright and catchy, but still subtle and delicate. TT Ricordi Fulmini was drawn by Marina, and the initial inspiration for the project was the inscription on the altar from the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia. As the font was pulled into “contemporaneity”, it was completely transformed and revealed its new side.
The main catchy detail in the TT Ricordi Fulmini font is the aggressive and rather sharp diagonal serifs. In addition, in the process of working on the font, several graphic solutions emerged, for example, the mono-serifs and the very calligraphic connections of diagonal strokes with their historic spirit. We wanted to keep them, and thus 4 thematic visual sets appeared in the font, thanks to which we can greatly change the perception of the font. In addition, the font has a set of interesting discrete ligatures.
