Morta is a handwritten unicase typeface with a slight calligraphic influence. Its design, like a centuries-old cold dark stones, has carved edges and polished corners, and represented by two styles: more legible “Brute” for general use, and more contrast “Grace” for large text size.
While working on concept sketches, I synthesized such theses as historical and cartoon, mystical and attractive. What if I mirror the slant of an Italic writing in the other direction to create the feeling of looking from the other side, from behind the mirror? And if I use some calligraphic techniques and strokes? I worked to create a deliberately irregular shape with a minimal use of straight lines. At the same time, I avoided sharp corners in order to express the form chiseled by many centuries, like a stones polished by sea water. The Morta font is all about journey and unknown, so let the adventure begin!

Styles: Brute. The complete family is available here: https://creativemarket.com/michaelrafailyk/11023806-Morta-typeface
Scripts: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic.
Languages: 480+. The list of supported languages: https://michaelrafailyk.com/morta
Glyphs: 1156.
Kerning: 508 class-to-class pairs.
Hinting: Manual PostScript.
Format: otf, woff.

Unicase: The design combines the shapes of uppercase and some lowercase letters.
Stylistic Alternates: TtЗзЖжНнУуФфЦцЧчЩщЯя
Stylistic Set 01 “Arrows”: Please read the Description.txt file to see an examples.
Stylistic Set 02 “Interpunct”: All space characters are replaced with its alternate version that contains vertically centered dot that mimics word separation in the ancient Latin script.
Stylistic Set 03 “Ruthenian Cyrillic”: The letters ЖжНнУуФфЦцЧчЩщЯя are replaced with its historical Ukrainian Cyrillic forms. With respect to the project “Graphics of the Ukrainian language”.
Ordinals: adehnorst.
Superscript, Subscript, Numerator, Denominator: 0123456789.
Fractions: ¼½¾⅐⅑⅒⅓⅔⅕⅖⅗⅘⅙⅚⅛⅜⅝⅞⅟ (precomposed). Any other fractions (even those typed through a slash) will also be displayed correctly, with the automatic replacement to Numerator + fraction + Denominator.
Slashed Zero: All 0 figures.
Localized Forms: 20 character substitutions for Azeri, Catalan, Dutch, German, Kazakh, Moldavian, Polish, Romanian, Tatar, Turkish.
Glyph Composition/Decomposition (Diacritics): Full Latin and based Vietnamese set of diacritics (571 characters). Precomposed.

The promo images used “The Dedication” painting by Edmund Blair Leighton, “The Idyll” painting by Mykola Pymonenko, photos of Steve Johnson from Pexels and Matt Brett from Unsplash, “What did we have?” poetry by Lina Kostenko, the Sonnets’ dedication by William Shakespeare, and illustrations by Michael Rafailyk.

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