CharterbendFront sheet · Image credits
Image credits
Every image on this site is listed here with its author, its source and the terms it is published under. There are three kinds, and the difference between them matters more than it usually does.
The one picture this site will never print
The obvious illustration for a publication about a bank is a photograph of a branch: the building, the sign above the door, the counter inside. That photograph is exactly what this site will not print. A sign, a storefront, a counter, and a uniform are trade dress — the appearance by which an institution is recognized — and putting them on a page about that institution suggests a connection that does not exist. This publication has no connection to any institution it writes about, and it declines to imply one in a picture after denying it in a line of text.
So: no logo, no brand typeface, no brand colors, no favicon of an institution, and no photograph of its premises, interiors, or staff. Nor a stock photograph of some other bank standing in for the one being written about, which would be a small untruth dressed as decoration. Nor a photograph of a person used to illustrate a name on the masthead — the writers here have no portraits, and a stranger’s face will not be borrowed to give an invented byline a look of life.
That is a rule about what is in the frame, and it was once read too widely. The first edition of this page said the site carried no photographs at all, which confused the prohibition with the medium. An engraved specimen sheet of 1828 and a worn account book say nothing about any institution covered here; they are simply what this subject has always looked like on paper.
Diagrams drawn for this publication
Five line diagrams, drawn from nothing in SVG by this publication’s own script. Each is built from the registers and filings named on the page that carries it, and those documents are listed in the source register like every other source. There is no stock art, no clip art, no traced logo, and no third-party illustration anywhere on this site.
| Diagram | What it shows | Author, source, and license |
|---|---|---|
| Holding structure and supervision | How a holding company, its bank, and the agencies that charter, supervise, and insure sit in relation to one another | Charterbend Publishing, LLC — own work, drawn in SVG. © 2026, all rights reserved |
| The two approval tracks | The two statutory tracks a bank merger runs on, side by side, each with the party consulted and the clock the statute sets | Charterbend Publishing, LLC — own work, drawn in SVG. © 2026, all rights reserved |
| The asset threshold scale | The asset levels at which a further set of filing and supervisory rules begins to apply, with one reported holding company total marked against them | Charterbend Publishing, LLC — own work, drawn in SVG. © 2026, all rights reserved |
| Offices by state | Six horizontal bars, one for each state in which the office register records offices, each labelled with its own count | Charterbend Publishing, LLC — own work, drawn in SVG. © 2026, all rights reserved |
| The charter in filed events | Eight events the registers record against one bank charter, set in the order they were recorded rather than on a scale of time | Charterbend Publishing, LLC — own work, drawn in SVG. © 2026, all rights reserved |
Each diagram is drawn from the documents named on the page that carries it, and each carries a text alternative and a caption there.
Reuse is easy to arrange. A diagram may be reproduced with attribution to Charterbend and a link to the page it appears on; any other use is a question for press@charterbend.digital. The terms of use set out the rest.
Photographs, and where they come from
Two photographs of objects held by a museum. Both are works in the public domain, and both are published by that museum through its own programmatic interface. The wording below is the museum’s, not ours: its documentation states that the interface “gives access to all of The Met’s Open Access data and to corresponding high resolution images (JPEG format) that are in the public domain”, and the record for each object returns the field isPublicDomain set to true. Both records were read on September 22, 2026.
| Image | What it shows | Author, source, and license |
|---|---|---|
| The engraver’s specimen sheet | Counters, rosettes and the engraver’s own title, from the upper band of a sheet a New York firm used to sell banks a vocabulary for their notes | Asher Brown Durand, Specimen Sheet of Bank Note Engraving, ca. 1828 — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1917; public domain. Object 339836 |
| An account book | A small bound ledger of the eighteen-thirties, its marbled boards rubbed through at the corners | John Carlin, Account Book Ledger, 1835–56 — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dale T. Johnson Fund, 2009; public domain. Object 20365 |
Neither object belongs to, or depicts, any institution this publication covers. Neither caption suggests otherwise.
The mark, the ornament, the typefaces
The mark beside the name is a heraldic bend — a band running from the upper left — across a ruled folio, which is what a charter is. It is drawn by this publication’s own script, and the browser icon, the home-screen icon and the sharing image are three further outputs of that same script rather than three drawings that might drift apart. No element of it — not its color, not its shape, not its lettering — is taken from any institution covered here.
The band of fine curves at the top of every page is a guilloche, the lathe-turned lattice engraved into certificates so that they could not be copied by hand. It is ours, drawn from five sine curves whose periods divide the width of the tile, which is why it repeats without a seam. It carries no meaning and is hidden from screen readers and from print.
Three typeface families are used: Faustina for display, Libre Franklin for text, and Courier Prime for the machine-made strings — form numbers, document identifiers, dates in data. All three are published under the SIL Open Font License, version 1.1, and that license asks to travel with the fonts it covers: each link above opens the copy shipped beside the font file on this server, not a copy of it somewhere else. All three are served from here as subsetted files rather than fetched from an external font service, so reading a page here sends no request to anybody.
There is no icon font and no icon set beyond that one mark. The few marks that appear between items are ordinary characters from those typefaces.
Finally, and it is worth its own line: there is no seal, no badge, and no trust mark anywhere on this site. No official sign or logo of a deposit insurer appears in the header, in the footer, in the browser icon, or in any image — that prohibition is set out on the independence page, and it is absolute.