Antwerp On a visit to Belgium and the Netherlands while still an MA student at Reading University, Eleni Beveratou made some important discoveries. First, there was the letter âgâ from the Didot family seen at Plantin Moretus Museum in Antwerp, which seemed âalmost like a mistakeâ. Then there were strange details such as the serifs on the âlâ, âhâ, âkâ, âbâ â¨and âdâ in Egmont Cursive and other typefaces by Sjoerk Hendrik de Roos, found in volumes of poetry she picked up from a chaotic bookshop in Amsterdam. These were characters that stood out from the text but seemed to blend harmoniously with the rest â¨of the letters. âAnd there it was, the spark. â¨I decided to design a typeface that would capture the details of the process of writing.â A guiding hand Eleni shared her initial thoughts with Phil Garnham and Jason Smith. They liked what they saw in her tentative first sketches, and gave her the chance to develop her ideas further. Phil, in particular, provided valuable input as FS Olivia took shape. Eleniâs main influence â the handwritten â would give the font its character. âWhen creating a typeface,â says Eleni, âitâs fair to say that it reflects some of the designerâs personality. And thatâs certainly the case with â¨FS Olivia. âAlthough technology is part of my everyday life. I am a great admirer of traditional graphic design where you can touch and feel paper and ink.â Irregular âWhat I particularly like,â says Eleni, âis that a printed item can develop its own personality sometimes as a result of imperfections in the print. âFS Olivia has some of â¨these characteristics as itâs inspired by handwriting, â¨and yet it also includes some â¨very modern features.â Feminine and fascinating, FS Olivia captures the expressive twists and turns of (the poetâs?) pen on paper, with low junctions, â¨deep top serifs and semi-rounded edges. Round outstrokes contrast with â¨the rough corners of the instroke, while strong diagonals and inclined serifs create a richly textured pattern. Polytonic Itâs only fitting that there should be a version of this poetic font for one of the birthplaces of poetry and song. Eleni, who hails from Athens, developed an extensive range of glyphs that could be used for the Greek language, in both modern and ancient texts. For the latter, there is a version of Olivia for displaying polytonic Greek (a system that utilises a range of accents and âbreathingsâ), which brings the 21st century technology of OpenType to the presentation of poetic texts from Ancient Greece. Just think what Homer could have done with that.