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80 entries, 188 steal-notes — 85 by hand, 103 model drafts. Every entry answers: where is it from, what family is it, and what would you steal? 4 results have public source URLs; source correspondence awaits human review.

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Civilisovaná žena

Swiss / International · type specimen · via V&A Collections

Steal · typographymodel draft
The title is split across the vertical black/red boundary: CIVILIS (white on black) and OVANÁ ŽENA (white on red) use the same bold grotesque, but the second half is letter-spaced more widely so the two halves read as equal tone despite the different backgrounds.
Steal · grid/layoutmodel draft
The composition is a single vertical opposition: black left third (hair and title) against red right two-thirds (hand and scissors). The scissors cross the boundary at the exact optical centre, creating the only transition between the two fields.
Steal · colormodel draft
Exactly two hues plus black and white. The red is a single flat value used at full strength; the black is used both as solid field and as halftone illustration. No gradients, no tints, no secondary colours.

Original: Rossmann, Zdeněk · 1929

private-reference-only

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Source & usage rights

Original: Rossmann, Zdeněk · 1929. Source verification: pending review.

Recorded rights label: private-reference-only. Original work and reproduction rights belong to their owners. A note license does not grant rights to copy a screenshot, trademark or design.

Trova notes: apply the principles in your own work, including commercial projects. Bulk republication or resale is not permitted. .

Provenance & takedown

Publicly sourced references link to an original; private or concept examples are labelled separately. All referenced work belongs to its creators. What this vault adds — and what it is for — is the commentary: the steal-notes are the content, not the pixels. Notes are written by hand unless their card says otherwise; a model draft is always labelled. Study use only.

Made something shown here and want it removed? Email util.wills@gmail.com with the entry title or a link to this page — it comes down promptly, no questions asked.

Try it in your agent · no key

One command puts these notes inside Claude Code. Without a key the agent sees 5 families and gets 5 calls a day — enough to judge the taste before you rent it. The key opens every family and lifts the meter.

claude mcp add --transport http trova https://trova.design/api/mcp

Herbert Bayer — Universal alphabet, proof sheet

Swiss / International · type specimen · via V&A Collections

Steal · typographymodel draft
Delete the capitals entirely. The whole alphabet is single-case — there is no uppercase to fall back on, so hierarchy has to be carried by size, weight and position alone. Try it as a hard constraint: text-transform: lowercase on every heading, then make the page work anyway. What survives is real hierarchy rather than shouting.
Steal · texture/materialmodel draft
One glyph is blown up to roughly 8× the alphabet's reading size and filled with a coarse grain, sitting immediately beside the same letterforms set plain. The identical shape appears twice — once as information, once as image. Steal the pairing, not the grain: a display-scale letterform with texture next to the same face at body scale, clean.
Steal · grid/layoutmodel draft
Composition is anchored in the upper two-thirds and the bottom third is left completely empty — not balanced, just abandoned. Caption text is tiny and bold, giving a display-to-caption ratio near 20:1 with nothing in between. Two type sizes, one enormous void.

Fonts: Universal (Bayer) · Original: Herbert Bayer

V&A Collections

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Source & usage rights

Original: Herbert Bayer. Work date: 1926?. Primary metadata checked 2026-10-01. V&A API O1348589 names Bayer as designer and preserves the uncertain date. Capture correspondence and reproduction rights remain unverified.

Recorded rights label: V&A Collections. Original work and reproduction rights belong to their owners. A note license does not grant rights to copy a screenshot, trademark or design.

Trova notes: apply the principles in your own work, including commercial projects. Bulk republication or resale is not permitted. Usage terms.

Captured: 2026-08-02. Capture does not establish source verification.

Steal this vault

Civilisovaná žena

Herbert Bayer — Universal alphabet, proof sheet

GT America specimen

Berkeley Graphics — Berkeley Mono