Maestro is the outcome of a collaboration between two complementary minds: American penman Philip Bouwsma and Canadian curvemaster Patrick Griffin of CanadaType. The twosome has worked together before; this time the result is truly spectacular. Maestro is an exemplary reconciliation of calligraphic sensibility and digital sophistication. In Griffin’s words: “Maestro is the font that Arrighi and his colleagues would have made if they had had digital technology”. Ludovico degli Arrighi was one of several Renaissance writing masters who promoted the style we have come to know as “italic”. Neither the engraved wood blocks used to multiply these scripts, nor the metal fonts based on their designs managed to fully capture the subtlety of the hand-written models. With digital fonts, the virtuosity and liveliness of the Italian maestri has finally found its way into type design. The Maestro family consists of forty fonts, but the OpenType version compresses the family with all its ligatures, alternates and swash characters down to just two fonts, regular and bold, each containing over 3,350 characters. For more information on Maestro’s background, read the PDF accompanying the family.

Late last year, Barcelona-based designer Eduardo Manso introduced Geogrotesque, a family of geometric yet very readable sans-serifs that became immediately popular. The new variant Geogrotesque Stencil closely follows the original family’s structure, addressing some of the typical problems most stencil fonts present. While many stencil fonts only have a limited number of weights, Geogrotesque Stencil offers seven weights. Also, in most stencil fonts, the width of the “gaps” works well with a small range of sizes only; Geogrotesque Stencil proposes 3 widths of cuts, called A, B and C. This solution has multiple advantages. It turns the sub-family into a versatile font for headlines, pull quotes and the like; and it makes it technically superior when used for cutting real stencils, allowing the user to choose the version best adapted to the rigidity of the material to be cut. Smart stuff.

Years ago, the Dutch-German-Finnish trio that calls itself Underware raised the bar for brush script fonts with their Bello typeface, a milestone in the genre. Liza Pro is a further exploration of scripts, using the wizardry of OpenType architecture to create a font that approaches human hand lettering as closely as possible. Out of a stock of 4,000 hand-crafted characters, Liza creates the optimal combination. All of this works like a breeze when using a program with full OpenType functionality; automatic substitution will make your text look different and fresh all the time. Liza’s style recalls 1950s advertising, but without a trace of nostalgia. Flirtsy, stylish, provocative, emotional, casual, moderate, clever & charming — Liza Pro has it all. Check out the introductory and the connoisseurs’ PDFs for details on how Liza’s five fonts work together.

Mussica from Corradine Fonts has many of the characteristics of a Bodoni-style “modern face” — vertical stress, thin hairlines, simple lines for serifs — while the ball terminals and the sloping top serifs suggest a transitional, 18th-century heritage. But it’s more eclectic than that. Mussica has the whimsicality and unpredictability typical of today’s “why not?” attitude in type design. Totally postmodern, as Robert Bringhurst would say. There’s an uppercase “R” in the middle of the lowercase set. There’s a wild set of swashes. The ascenders to ‘f’ and ‘t’ are short while ‘k’ and ‘l’ are long (in the OpenType font, you can have ‘f’ and ‘t’ both ways). The capitals dangle way below the baseline. That the font manages to maintain a certain dignity notwithstanding all this is a little wonder. A fashionable nouveauté for brochures a magazines.