MVB Embarcadero lies in a space between grotesque sans serifs and the vernacular signage lettering drawn by engineers. It’s a style that happens to convey credibility and forthrightness without pretense—it’s anti-style, actually. All of this makes for the most versatile of typefaces, capable of delivering any kind of message while staying out of the way. As is often the case with a type design that develops over several years, Embarcadero isn’t the realization of a specific concept. In the ’90s Mark van Bronkhorst began digitizing a blocky slab serif from the Victorian era, which was then set aside for many years. He later revisited the design, paring it down to its bare essentials, and as more time passed, it evolved from a grid-based outline to curves that echoed the rigid skeleton of the original. Eventually it became a complete family with all the readability requirements of a text sans serif, yet maintaining the subtle eccentricities of its inspiration. Functionally, the Embarcadero family is as adaptable as its design. The OpenType Pro set of 20 fonts contains two widths and five weights, each with italics, small caps, a full set of figures, bullets and arrows, and support for most Latin-based languages. In all, Embarcadero is suitable for headlines or text. And—thanks to its simple, square form—it’s ideal for type on screen too.

Garalde: the word itself sounds antique and arcane to anyone who isn’t fresh out of design school, but the sort of typeface it describes is actually quite familiar to all of us. Despite its age—born fairly early in printing’s history—the style has fared well; Garaldes are still the typefaces of choice for books and other long reading. And so we continue to see text set in old favorites—Garamond, Sabon®, and their Venetian predecessor, Bembo®. Yet many new books don’t feel as handsome and readable as older books printed in the original, metal type. The problem is that digital type revivals are typically facsimiles of their metal predecessors, merely duplicating the letterforms rather than capturing the impression—both physical and emotional—that the typefaces once left on the page. MVB Verdigris is a Garalde text face for the digital age. Inspired by the work of 16th-century punchcutters Robert Granjon (roman) and Pierre Haultin (italic), Verdigris celebrates tradition but is not beholden to it. Created specifically to deliver good typographic color as text, Mark van Bronkhorst’s design meets the needs of today’s designer using today’s paper and press. And now, as a full-featured OpenType release, it’s optimized for the latest typesetting technologies too. With MVB Verdigris Pro Text, Van Bronkhorst has revisited the family, adding small caps to all weights and styles, extensive language support, and other typographic refinements. Among the features: • Support for most Latin-based languages, including those of Central and Eastern Europe. • Precision spacing and kerning by type editor Linnea Lundquist. The fonts practically set beautiful text by themselves. • Proportional and tabular figure sets, each with oldstyle and lining forms with currency symbols to match. • Ligatures to maintain even spacing while accommodating Verdigris’ elegant, sweeping glyphs. • Numerators and denominators for automatic fractions of any denomination. • Useful, straightforward dingbats including arrows, checkboxes, and square and round bullets in three sizes. • Alternative ‘zero’ and ‘one’ oldstyle figures for those who prefer more contemporary versions over the traditional forms. • An alternative uppercase Q with a more reserved tail. • An optional, roman “Caps” font providing mid-caps, useful for titling settings, and for those situations when caps seem too big and small caps seem too small. __________ Sabon is a trademark of Linotype Corp. Bembo is a trademark of the Monotype Corporation.

A typeface is a tool. Sure, there are frilly fonts that are more art than craft, showy faces that exist merely to call attention to themselves. But, in the end, any functional typeface worth its salt lives to serve one thing first: the text, the content. Everything else—the fashion of the moment, the allure of individual words and letters—is secondary. MVB Solitaire™ epitomizes this universal typographic mandate. As a tempered sans serif somewhere between a humanist and a gothic, MVB Solitaire captures a 21st-century neutrality. But practical doesn’t have to mean banal. MVB Solitaire has a soul. While some “neutral” type is dead the moment the ink hits the page, MVB Solitaire delivers text that feels lively, contemporary, relevant. Readers will not tire of this type. Behind the useful exterior is an arsenal of thoughtful technical features. It’s no surprise that this family’s creator, Mark van Bronkhorst, was first a graphic designer before becoming a type designer. Mark built all the goodies into MVB Solitaire that he would appreciate as a user: case-sensitive punctuation; alternate forms that can be invoked individually or together; oldstyle and lining figures in both tabular and proportional widths; slightly shorter lining figures that don’t stand out in running text, but also cap-height figures for all-cap settings; and the ability to speak nearly any Latin-based language. MVB Solitaire aspires to be the sort of workhorse that a designer keeps installed on their system at all times. It is a family bound to have a permanent spot in the font menu, always at the ready for projects (those most common of all) where the typography mustn’t mask the message. It has that quality that all truly useful typefaces have: the capacity to get the job done without getting in the way.

Kanna Aoki had fairy tales in mind when she designed MVB Greymantle. She drew dots with a felt pen to build up the forms, giving them their particular rough character. The “Extras” font contains a set of whimsical illustrations, including a portrait of Greymantle—her 18-pound cat, a set of curly initial caps, and border parts.  MVB Greymantle has been spotted on numerous children's books, in magazines, in salad dressing advertisements, and on food packaging.

Mark van Bronkhorst's MVB Magnesium is based on his impressions of a style of lettering often seen on early 20th century hand-painted signage. With its thick-thin strokes and angled terminals, MVB Magnesium is a warmer, less common alternative whenever one might use a sans serif in all-caps. It is available in two widths.

MVB Dovetail is an editorially focused text serif designed by David Sudweeks. The working idea for the typeface came from a design school letter-making exercise: Take a pair of scissors and a few large sheets of paper, and start cutting. The resulting letters and the action itself of cutting them out of paper informed the type design process, producing strong, simple shapes and an open, inviting texture. Dovetail’s tone is crisp and straightforward. Its classic letterforms, set off with a touch of playfulness, give the design both a practical and spontaneous personality. The text weights capably set copy at a variety of sizes for print and render crisply on screen. Its lightest and heaviest weights perform best at display sizes. Care has been taken to save the typographer’s time with OpenType features including contextual punctuation and symbols to fit mixed-case, small-caps, and all-caps settings, as well as figure sets tuned to each use.

MVB Peccadillo is an interpreted revival of a metal typeface popular in the 19th Century, then known as Skeleton Antique. Highly condensed with extra short descenders, the face makes a big impact in a narrow space. Holly Goldsmith worked from letterpress-printed specimens of 96-point, antique metal type, deliberately retaining subtle distortions due to type wear and letterpress impression. Alan Dague-Greene, referring to printed samples of Skeleton Antique, adapted the design to create two additional optical sizes: “Eight” for smaller text and “Twenty-four” for subheads.

MVB Fantabular proves that monospaced faces needn’t be formal or bland. Inspired by the letterforms of older typewriters, Akemi Aoki designed a playful family of three weights with italics. With every character the same width MVB Fantabular works wherever a monospaced font is needed, but the face is so loose and carefree it hides its fixed pitch construction well, allowing it to be used in other settings too. A sans serif version—MVB Fantabular Sans—is also available.

MVB Gryphius is a digitization of uncommon type from an era normally associated with the work of Nicolas Jenson. Produced by Otto Trace, the fonts come from types used by Sebastian Gryphius in Lyon in the early 16th century. The italic appears in a book from 1524 and the roman and small caps appear with the same italic in another book printed by Gryphius in 1541. Retaining the rough contours and uneven texture of its source, MVB Gryphius is best used at text sizes from 12- to 15-point, but its old world character can work in display settings too.

Reminiscent of the hand-lettering found in mid-century children’s books, Akemi Aoki’s MVB Grenadine is a quirky sans, broken free of its geometric roots. Letterforms bounce along the baseline in a jolly dance, yet remain clear and legible, whatever the reader’s age. MVB Grenadine is available in a broad range of six weights, each with italics.

Lettering on a vintage bottle cap served as inspiration for MVB Pedestria. Akemi Aoki’s design is simple and legible, yet full of life, thanks to its loose, casual forms. Two sets of irreverent Pict fonts take characters from ubiquitous public restroom door symbology to a new level, providing playful pictograms for invitations, advertising, and infographics.

Gayle Sato, longtime friend of MVB Fonts, has amazing handwriting. It’s a natural, simple hand, with perfect rhythm. Devoid of flourishes, it doesn’t try to be beautiful. It’s just genuine, quick, and clean — the handwriting we all wish we had. The digitization by Mark van Bronkhorst captures these qualities. Retaining the roughness of a felt pen, MVB Calliope is a handwriting typeface that feels much more authentic than most, highly legible but still raw. The Regular was released in 2005, with the other weights shortly thereafter.

Mundane information—the sort you might ignore—often appears in the form of very simple, utilitarian lettering, devoid of personality, the sort of industrial lettering you find on old blueprints, park restrooms, and electrical boxes. MVB Diazo is such a thing. It looks like lettering done earnestly with a plastic template. The monoline caps—constructed from straight lines and simple curves—have rounded details as if rendered by a blunt pen on a topographical survey or by a router on a rustic campground sign. The MVB Diazo fonts are compact, available in two widths: Condensed and Extra Condensed. Each width offers four weights from Light to Black. The fonts are perfect for wherever plain and boring letterforms are required. All widths and weights are also available in two distressed textures (#1 and #2) that accentuate the industrial character of the design. Rough #1 is gritty, with finer texture for use at larger sizes. Rough #2 exhibits more damage, the roughness apparent when used at smaller sizes. The Rough fonts include alternates of a number of glyphs so that variation of texture is possible when letters repeat in a word.

A rare natural history book from the early 18th century served as inspiration for the MVB Sirenne typefaces. The artisan who engraved the book—likely a map engraver—had a distinctive style of lettering that was used on the descriptive captions for the many tropical fishes depicted in the book. The plates used to print the illustrations would have been copper, the letterforms hand-engraved. The designers at MVB Fonts found the distinctive quirks of the roman letterforms and the eccentric stress of the italic interesting enough to embark on developing digital fonts based on the engraved samples. As the captions were hand-lettered, there was a great degree of variation, making a direct “revival” impossible, so Alan Dague-Greene interpreted the characteristics of the letterforms into a workable typeface design. The challenge was to retain a rustic quirkiness to the forms, yet have a typeface that was useful for more than display. The solution was to make optical sizes. The “Six” faces are full of character, but strong and open for clarity at small sizes. The design of the “Text” faces is more subtle, so that they can be used for passages of text, but retain the feel of their model. MVB Sirenne “Eighteen” and “Seventy Two” are intended for display use.

A hand-rendered advertisement for a leather tanner, appearing in a French book from the ’40s, served as inspiration for MVB Bovine. Using its comic sway and slightly exaggerated forms, the typeface delivers bold headlines with a wink and a smile. MVB Bovine is all-caps with a set of discretionary ligatures. It's available in versions with sharp or rounded corners.

Kanna Aoki drew the letters for MVB Emmascript while on a picnic near the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Mark van Bronkhorst adapted the writing as a font that maintains a very natural scrawl. Later a bold weight was added. MVB Emmascript has been used to add a lighthearted, human touch to everything from fiction paperbacks to potato chip packaging. The typeface is named for Aoki's 1968 Volkswagen, Emma.

Geometron has its origin in a custom typeface that I was commissioned to design for an architectural project. The concept was a "back to basics", minimalist typeface constructed mainly with straight lines and circles or circular arcs, but without departing from the classical style of Roman & Greek lettering. Notable requirements were: an extensive character set needed for multi-language documentation, as well as a full collection of symbols and alternate glyph forms (e.g. superiors & inferiors) for scientific use. Special care was taken to obviate the almost identical similarities that were prone to appear between letters like uppercase "i" and lowercase "L" or between Latin and Greek letters such as "a" and "alpha". This was also a prerequisite for scientific notation where ambiguity is not acceptable. All in all, the font would have to blend a modern design with a wealth of functional features. Consequently, all of these were made possible by choosing the OpenType format for development, resulting in a comprehensive and feature-rich font family specifically targeted for use in high-end design/typesetting applications.

Regulaire is my laid back comic font, inspired by graffiti and my everyday regular handwriting. Works quite nice for kids products, comics, party posters - or anything that needs a casual comic look!

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.

MVB Aunt Mildred has a vintage charm that evokes hand-lettered postcards or advertising. Akemi Aoki drew the letterforms with a fine-tip felt pen and named it after her great aunt. Since its release in 1995, Aunt Mildred has been a popular choice for children’s books. Italics and bold weights have been added, making it even more useful for publications, packaging, and greetings of all sorts.

MVB Fantabular proves that monospaced faces needn’t be formal or bland. Inspired by the letterforms of older typewriters, Akemi Aoki designed a playful family of three weights with italics. With every character the same width MVB Fantabular works wherever a monospaced font is needed, but the face is so loose and carefree it hides its fixed pitch construction well, allowing it to be used in other settings too. MVB Fantabular Sans is the sans serif version of MVB Fantabular.

MVB Solano Gothic Bold was originally designed as a display face for the City of Albany, California (located on the San Francisco Bay facing the Golden Gate Bridge and bordering Berkeley). Named for the City’s main street, the typeface needed to work on signage in proximity to early 20th Century buildings, and in contemporary settings. Rather than creating a neutered design to cover all bases, Mark van Bronkhorst chose to develop a simple, strong, condensed face that would offer flexibility of style by providing both retro and more contemporary forms. Solano Gothic has since been expanded to a family offering five weights from Light to Bold. The basic fonts provide upper- and lowercase forms, with figures designed to harmonize within upper- and lowercase settings (the standard figures are not full cap height). The same figures are provided with Small Caps, and align to small cap height. For all-cap settings requiring figures and monetary symbols of full-cap height, there are the “Cap” fonts. An alternate tabular “1” is provided in all fonts so that both fitted and tabular settings of figures are possible (access to alternate characters subject to system or application support).

Mark van Bronkhorst’s MVB Sacre Bleu was inspired by an example of French handwriting from the 1930s. With a goal to keep the script as authentic as possible, the font includes a number of ligatures to avoid letterform repetition. The year it released, MVB Sacre Bleu was selected as one of Typographica’s Favorite Typefaces, where reviewer Joshua Lurie-Terrell deemed it “stylish, memorable, and decidedly unkitschy.”

Kanna Aoki was designing fabrics and dishware for several major manufacturers when she designed MVB Cafe Mimi. The design came from a few words Aoki painted as decoration for a set of cappuccino cups. Aoki created the Regular weight for MVB Fonts using a brush. The Bold was adapted after digitization. Using several double-letter ligatures, the fonts can feel as natural and spontaneous as the original hand-painted lettering. Despite its curlicues and free-flowing forms, great care was taken to keep this script balanced and legible. It skips and hops along the baseline but doesn't lose its step.

MVB Bossa Nova is based on unattributed hand-lettering found in an old book, circa 1946. Yet unlike many scripts based on a vintage source, it feels fresh and dynamic. This is due to the skilled hands of Holly Goldsmith, who gave the forms a contemporary vigor despite their age. Alternate glyphs with extended ascenders offer extra flair.

MVB Hotsy Totsy is Akemi Aoki’s first typeface design. Aoki created the letters in cut paper. Once digitized, the design was expanded to offer several weights and styles. Exaggerating the triangular serifs and tapering strokes of “Latin” typefaces, MVB Hotsy Totsy is the perfect party face, appearing frequently on board games, product packaging, and in children’s books. It is named for (what was at the time) a dive bar in Albany, California. The bar has since been renovated but its neon sign was preserved, a local landmark of San Francisco’s East Bay.

An old book found at a Paris bouquiniste contained samples of the typeface “Caractère de finance,” a bâtarde design by 18th century typefounder Pierre Simon Fournier. Rather than revive the type, Kanna Aoki decided to reinvent it, using a felt pen to achieve a rustic, handwritten quality, departing from the 18th century model as she saw fit. MVB Chanson d'Amour conveys a soulful elegance that stops short of the ostentatious, overwrought found in many formal scripts. It is lovely and sweet, but never saccharine.