Calvino is a font with 38 weights, and if that's not enough to find what you're looking for in a font, you're probably dealing with something more complex than typeface indecisiveness. This typeface was inspired by calligraphy, which exudes a sense of formality in a much more legible and lively manner. While this font would be perfect in the bold weight for logomarks, the medium-range weights would effortlessly work for short editorial designs.
In designing the Calvino typeface family, Andrea Tartarelli set himself the challenge to follow the principles expressed by the Italian writer Italo Calvino in his masterpiece Six memos for the next millenium. The principles of exactitude and visibility are translated typographically through the reference to sixteenth century garaldetypefaces and their controlled, highly legible letterforms.
To balance this formal rigour, the principles of lightness and quickness were added, by letting the design process be inspired by the calligraphic hand, following the lesson of Gudrun Zapf.
The idea of multiplicity was kept central through a range of weights encompassing both display and text use cases, and then expanding the design space with the inclusion of a display sub-family, Calvino Grande.
Sharing the same formal structure, Calvino Grande sports condensed proportions, sharper details and tighter metrics. Both Calvino and Calvino Grande are complemented with a set of italic letterforms, with differences in design and slant to better work at different point size. All the 38 weights of the Calvino family come with a extended latin and cyrillic charset, covering over two hundred languages, and all equipped with a wide range of open type features including positional numerals, alternate forms, and stylistic sets.
Special thanks go to Laurène Girbal for the help in developing the regular weight.
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