Maria Martina Schmitt was born in Vienna (Austria) in 1950. After completing an apprenticeship as a commercial artist at "Graphischen" in her home city, she began working as a graphic designer. For ten years, she worked with the "United States Information Agency" in both Austria and the United States. Projects there led her into the realm of type design, where she worked with PostScript fonts dealing with a number of writing systems, including Armenian and Georgian. Since 1998, Schmitt has being working as a freelance designer, focusing on cultural collateral, economic publications, illustration, type design, and logo design. In 1998, she designed the masthead of the "Tiroler Tageszeitung" for the newspaper designer Rolf Rehe, and in 2004, she illustrated the book "Sepp Holzers Permakultur, Praxisbuch", published by the Stocker Verlag in Graz (Austria). Maria Martina Schmitt has two typefaces in the Linotype Library: and . Airam is a display font from the new Take Type No. 5 which contains 204 exclusive, contemporary fonts for electronic publishing. Quartan is an industrial, unicase sans serif family, with three weights. Maria Martina Schmitt developed this series of typefaces for designers to use when setting chunks of text en masse. Being a unicase design, Quartan’s letterforms have no ascenders or descenders; lines of text may be stacked virtually on top of one other. This offers a multitude of possibilities for headline, logo, or corporate identity design. Airam and Quartan are trademarks of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG, which may be registered in certain jurisdictions, exclusively licensed through Linotype GmbH, a wholly owned subsidiary of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG.