Chianti was designed at Bitstream by senior designer Dennis Pasternak in 1991 and initially released in 1995. The intent behind the design was to provide a humanist sanserif of high readability at a wide range of sizes and weights. Humanist sanserifs (others that fall into this category are Linotype’s Frutiger and Optima, and Monotype’s Gill Sans) are an attempt to improve the readability of sanserifs by applying classical roman structure to the letterforms. To enhance its versatility, Mr. Pasternak designed a wide variety of alternate characters, rare ligatures, ornaments and swashes. Chianti is a friendly sanserif useful for a broad range of typographic needs.

Mark van Bronkhorst designed MVB Celestia Antiqua at a time when font choice was limited. Design was characterized by overuse of the few fonts that came with laser printers. A rustic typeface, recalling the roughness and irregularity of pre-digital printing, was a response to the cold crispness of DTP. MVB Celestia Antiqua holds its own among a large group of other “weathered” serif fonts, in part due to the size of the family: three weights, small caps, italics, and two titling styles. But it's also successful because it's simply drawn well, the contours only as rough as they need to be, enabling text at any size, large or small.

Prototype is a typeface with a very contemporary identity crisis—is it old or new? uppercase or lowercase? serif or sans-serif? Prototype tries to be all things to all people. There have been many attempts at creating a universal typeface, one that rationalises the alphabet and removes the inconsistencies of upper and lower case, applying an unreasonable logic to something that has grown organically ...and is already perfectly usable! Prototype was the same experiment carried out at a time when design was experiencing an identity crisis of its own—letterforms that try to be all things to all people but end up being something else entirely.

Marista is a bit of an unusual design, a cursive monospaced font inspired by the classic cursive typewriter fonts used in the 1960s-70s. It is designed to feel 'real', and captures some of the light irregularities in line weight which characterise real typewritten text rather than their computer equivalents. Marista is distinctive but easily readable, even in block text where some monospaced fonts suffer. Marista is best used at small to medium sizes, and at a uniform size throughout a document or design to capture the typewritten feel. The italic is more similar to authentic typewriter cursive fonts. Try it for your next letter or invitation!