Mario De Libero designed Swanstone while investigating XIX Century Old Style typefaces. Designs like Theophile Beaudoire’s Romana (1860) or Miller & Richard’s Modernized Old Style, that re-imagined the classical “Venetian” letterforms adding flared serifs and early Art Nouveau influences. In Italy, one of these fonts was Raffaello Bertieri’s Raffaello, which De Libero used as the starting point of his research in a contemporary retelling of these exuberant and sexily unsettling letterforms.

This font family is based on the letterforms of a fin-de-siècle sans serifs, and comes in two versions - Roman and Shadow.