Montecatini Pro: An Interview
Redesigned and expanded with additional weights and widths, Montecatini Pro came in at #9 this year on MyFonts’ list of bestselling new fonts in 2019. We talked with Louise to learn more.
What inspired you to design this typeface? Were you designing for a specific use case or customer? Or were you more focused on a particular artistic vision? Or some combination of both?
Montecatini takes its cues from the elegant Stile Liberty travel posters of Italy in the early 1900s. During the early 1980s, I made my first visit to Montecatini Terme, where I came across a poster with wonderfully idiosyncratic letterforms, which have been a continued source of inspiration ever since. While working on the family expansion of Montecatini, we renewed our focus on the Stile Liberty’s variations of lettering, both condensed and expanded, light and bold. The use of an array of styles — peppered with ligatures throughout — created a vibrant typographic system. We realized that it would be more advantageous to design with Montecatini if there were varying degrees of width and weight to work with. These observations would become the basis for how we interpreted the lettering’s behavior into a functional typeface.
Walk us through the process of designing this typeface. Was there anything different about it, compared to your usual process? Did it come along more easily than others, or were there unique challenges?
The process of designing Montecatini Pro was both straightforward and challenging. Since we had already drawn its initial style (now Stretto Light), the voice of the font was known and our task was to find out how to carry its timbre into new widths and weights. The most challenging component of this task was executing the many ligatures in wider and bolder versions. Each combination had to be considered and reviewed, and in the end many were left out as they failed to match our expectations in the most extreme styles.
Looking ahead, are there new projects you’re excited about? Anything you haven’t tried yet but are eager to explore?
We’ve been exploring more Italian letterforms from the 1920s and 30s, from both hand-lettered and wood type sources. We hope to have many more font families to follow!
