Being inspired by early Czech type design, Maiola is clearly a contemporary typeface, that is mindful of its historical heritage, implementing old-style features and calligraphic reminiscence, more frankly so in the Italic. Nevertheless, through its personality, it attempts to create a welcoming tension on the page, without shouting too loudly at the reader. It handles its expressive tendencies with care and in doing so increases its usability, with legibility being of great importance. Subtle irregularities of the letterforms enhance furthermore the dynamic spirit and liveliness of the typeface. With the advent of Opentype, allowing for bigger character-sets and better language support, as a natural consequence, Maiola Multiscript covers Latin A, Cyrillic and Greek. Although basically independent from each other, they are, however, designed in the same spirit as the Latin, and harmonize well in multilingual text settings. The update to this beautiful font family includes the addition of over 240 glyphs featuring new ornaments, stylistic alternates, ligatures, superior letters, fractions and more. Furthermore, several glyphs were significantly improved and the kerning was fine tuned for better performance. Originally released in 2005, Maiola was an immediate success. It won the renowned TDC competition in 2004 where it was also recognized as a “judge’s choice”, was part of the touring exhibition e-a-t, and was selected in the Creative Review design competition in 2005.

Bernhardt Standard, which was designed in 2003 by Julius de Goede, is a flowing Bastarde script. Bastarde is one of the sub-categories of Blackletter typefaces. The term Blackletter refers to typefaces that have evolved out of Northern Europe’s medieval manuscript tradition. Often called gothic, or Old English, these letters are identifiable by the traces of the wide-nibbed pen stroke within their forms. Of all of the various sorts of Blackletter styles, Bastarde scripts are the most flowing, or Italic. The first Bastarde typefaces, cut in the late 1400s, were based on French handwriting styles, especially those styles popular in Burgundy. The flowing nature of Bernhardt Standard makes it similar to some other sorts of Blackletter typefaces as well. Bernhardt Standard, because of its handwritten roots, is also similar to Kurrent, a style of handwriting that was popular in Germany prior the 20th Century. Bernhardt Standard is a very calligraphic face, suitable for formal applications. This typeface would be an excellent choice for certificates or awards. The old style figures in the font allow for nice short settings of text as well.