New Additions: May 2026
31st May 2026
From the hundreds of fonts we add to the Identifont database every month we chose a selection of the most interesting recent additions, and interviewed the designers about their approach to each design:
Dmitrii Mikitenko – Mozart II (Blessed Print)
Mozart II is a renewed version of your earlier typeface Mozart Script. Why did you decide to update it, and what are the main differences?
The first version of Mozart Script was released in 2016. I still remember how quickly it attracted attention. At that time, I had only about a year of experience in type design, but the font became a bestseller and is still selling today. On Creative Market alone it has been purchased more than 5,000 times.
Over the years, people often asked me whether I was planning to update the font and add more alternates, especially for the uppercase letters. At some point, I decided to take the risk and create a renewed version. Also, after almost ten years of experience, I see and understand type design very differently than I did before.
But I would not be myself if I simply took the old font and added something new to it. I kept only the proportions, the general style, and the basic qualities that make the font recognizable and connected to the first version. But in essence, Mozart II is not a twin of the original Mozart Script. It is more like a brother or sister: they have the same roots, they look related, but they are completely different.
You’ve described Mozart II as a Spencerian script, referring to the cursive handwriting style developed by the American calligrapher Platt Rogers Spencer from the 1850s. Were there any particular typefaces you studied in developing Mozart II?
Like Spencer, I pay great attention to the aesthetic side of writing, and my work is also based on the technique of pointed pen calligraphy. I have seen many examples of Spencerian and pointed pen lettering, but I cannot point to one specific source or typeface that directly influenced Mozart II.
For me, creating a font is always partly an improvisation. It is difficult to predict where the creative process will take you. I always try to bring myself back to the general style and keep the whole typeface consistent, but even for me this can be quite difficult. Sometimes the work begins to develop its own character.
Mozart II has over 1500 glyphs, with multiple versions of each character to allow the designer to create natural, flowing calligraphy. Do you draft each character with a pen on paper first before digitising it, or do you work directly on the computer?
It is always different. It depends a lot on my mood and on the project itself. For Mozart II I created many of the sketches on my iPad. My process is already very well established, so I do not spend much time thinking about the tools. While creating a font, I constantly test it, so often a rough sketch on the tablet is enough for me to digitize the glyph and continue working on it in the font software.
Because my customers need a large number of alternates, I had to build a process that allows me to work as quickly and efficiently as possible. For this type of font, sketching on the iPad is probably the most convenient method.
But for my next font, I will most likely return to sketching with a pencil in my hand. It takes longer, but it gives a different feeling to the work. I cannot fully explain how it works, but I can feel the difference when I look at the final result.
Like many of your fonts, Mozart II takes advantage of OpenType ligatures to allow the designer to choose between multiple versions of each character simply by typing a number after the character they want to change, rather than needing to select stylistic alternates from a glyph palette in the design software. Why did you decide on this approach?
A long time ago, I noticed that there was no truly quick and convenient way to choose alternates. Of course, you can use stylistic alternates, but their number is limited in Glyphs, and this feature does not work equally well in every program. Ligatures, on the other hand, work almost everywhere: from Microsoft Word to Canva. And more importantly, they are fast and convenient.
I know that many of my customers are very visual. They need to see how a glyph looks directly inside a word, in the exact place where it will be used. It is much easier to type a number after a letter and instantly see another version than to search through a glyph palette and choose alternates manually.
For me, this approach is about giving designers a faster and more intuitive way to work with a complex script font.
In addition to the five weights, from Thin to Black, each weight comes in three styles you have called outline systems: Standard, Ex1 with a bolder baseline stroke, and Ex2 with reduced contrast for smaller text. Why did you provide these variants?
I came to this through experience. You never know at what size your font will be printed. Sometimes designers use the font quite small, and in that case the standard version may not be enough. Of course, it is possible to add a stroke manually in a design program and adjust its thickness, but what if someone does not have that option or does not know how to do it?
So I decided to include this possibility directly inside the font family. The smaller the text is, the more useful the Ex2 version becomes, because it has more support in the strokes and reduced contrast. This helps the font remain readable and beautiful even at smaller sizes.
For me, it is a practical solution. I wanted to give designers more control and make the font useful in real printing situations, not only in ideal preview images.
Clara Dousson and Alan Madic – EB Venezia (Électro-bibliothèque)
You’ve written that EB Venezia was based on a typeface designed by Olivetti in 1976 for their TES 501 electronic typewriter. What inspired you to develop this into a digital typeface?
What inspired us was first the richness of its original design and how relevant it still felt for reinterpretation today. The context in which it was created, linked to the technological development of typewriters, gives it a very strong formal logic that we found interesting to extend into a digital environment.
Working from scans of the daisywheel was particularly compelling for us; this object directly shaped the forms of the typeface, and translating it from this source felt essential. The reduced-width structure also represented a real design challenge, which guided part of the decision-making process.
The project can also be seen as a form of homage to Olivetti, whose innovation and approach to type design have always been a reference for us.
Given that the TES 501 was a daisywheel typewriter, did it support proportional spacing, or have you modified the original designs to give EB Venezia proportional spacing?
The daisywheel system of the TES 501 did not support true proportional spacing in the digital sense. Instead, it operated with a limited system of four fixed widths. Each glyph was assigned to one of these four predefined widths, which were directly defined by the technical constraints of the machine rather than by a fully proportional model.
Olivetti had already explored proportional typefaces earlier, notably with the Graphika manual typewriter in 1958, but these attempts were not widely adopted. It was really with the development of electric and then electronic typewriters that their approach evolved, adapting typefaces more closely to the capabilities of each machine.
In EB Venezia, we stayed faithful to this logic of discrete widths rather than converting it into a fully proportional system.
EB Venezia provides four weights, from light to bold. Do these reflect styles that were available in the original Olivetti typeface, or have you extended the design to provide the extra weights?
The original typeface only existed in a single weight. Introducing multiple weights was a conscious extension on our part. It felt interesting to push the project further, to expand its possibilities beyond its original technical constraints, and to make it more suitable for contemporary use.
EB Venezia looks ideal for business stationery, where readability is important; is this the type of application you had in mind for it?
As a text typeface, EB Venezia was always meant to support reading-focused uses where legibility is important, such as business stationery, and more broadly, editorial design. But we also wanted to keep it open and versatile rather than tied to a single application.
Kasper Pyndt Rasmussen – AT Canopy (Approximate Type)
AT Canopy is an unusual typeface with a sensual appearance. What prompted you to design it?
A friend of mine, graphic designer Peter Folkmar, was commissioned by The National Gallery of Denmark to create the design for an exhibition about Danish Symbolist drawings from around the turn of the 19th century. He asked me to create a bespoke typeface for this occasion, to be used on the museum-walls and in the exhibition catalogue.
It’s fitting that you describe Canopy's appearance as “sensual” since it inhabits a formal language that the Symbolists described as “pregnant”, inspired by the natural world, growth and fertility.
You’ve written that AT Canopy reflects the Symbolists’ fascination with dreams, mysticism, and the natural world. Is it a revival of an existing typeface, or did you create it based on symbolist lettering, painting, and drawing?
Peter had encountered a piece of lettering on the cover of a “how to draw” instruction manual that many artists of the time swore by; it seemed a natural reference point for the typeface. My job, essentially, was to tame this reference, to find a system, a structure, and convert it to a convincing and coherent typeface.
AT Canopy is also reminiscent of some Art Nouveau typefaces such as Eckmann and Arnold Böcklin; is there an overlap of influence between Symbolist design and the Art Nouveau movement?
There’s a strong overlap in style between Danish Art Nouveau and Danish Symbolism, who use similar visual languages with organic, leaf-like shapes and expressive strokes. These genres were also prominent at around the same time (~1890-1915) and several artists that are described as Symbolists are also described as practitioners of Art Nouveau. So I’m sure the genres sprouted from more or less the same zeitgeist. However, my art historic knowledge isn't strong enough to define the exact difference in gestalt, if any, between them. Ideologically, Symbolism was a reaction against realism and industrial materialism. It concerned itself with dreams and hallucinations and asked questions like “what lies behind reality?”. It was very philosophical in nature, whereas Art Nouveau emphasised style and form rather than spiritual matters.
Do you have any plans to extend AT Canopy with additional weights?
Drawing Canopy is probably the most fun I’ve had drawing a font. It’s a total cacophony of details and traits that really shouldn’t work on paper; but somehow they do, at the very least in this weight. I’ve attempted to draw a Light, but so far without any success because decreasing the stroke width compromises the rounded counters of letters like ‘A’, ‘E’, ‘F’, etc. If anyone has a good idea for how to approach a Light they’re more than welcome to e-mail me!
Hoang Nguyen and David Gobber – Sticks (Nguyen Gobber)
Sticks is a square-shaped typeface constructed entirely from straight lines, in a range of five weights. What led you to design it?
Sticks developed out of an exploration of how far we could push a type design that is entirely built with “sticks”, as in simple elongated rectangles, hence its name. The original design of Sticks, first released in 2019, consequently also featured only letterforms constructed from monolinear strokes with terminals cut perpendicular to the stroke direction.
The reworked and expanded version of Sticks that we re-released this year takes the original design and adapts it for more practical real-world applications. As a result, the strict rule of only perpendicular terminals was dropped in favour of mostly horizontal cuts that emphasise the baseline, x-height, and cap-height.
We also introduced rounded inside corners, making the design slightly more elaborate and giving the letter shapes a look similar to precision-milled metal components. Or at least, we think that this evokes a more technical, futuristic feel. Apart from these details, however, the rule of only working with straight, stick-like elements to build the typeface was kept, which is why no curved strokes appear anywhere in the glyph set.
The original release of Sticks included only two weights, light and bold. Expanding to five weights, along with the addition of a variable font, was an important step in making the typeface more versatile in practice. The bold weight was also pushed as far as possible to give it maximum contrast against the lighter cut.
Sticks and Sticks Light have a futuristic feel, but Sticks Bold harks back to the 1920’s constructivist movement, like P22 Constructivist Square. Were you consciously combining these two influences?
For the most part, the design of Sticks is the result of following the self-imposed design rules mentioned before rather than any particular design movement. But we completely see what you mean. When we first drew the bold letter shapes of capital ‘R’ and ‘P’, we also felt that they are quite reminiscent of constructivist aesthetics.
Although this connection was not a conscious choice, it might not be entirely coincidental either. While developing the bold style, we realised that it shares certain aesthetics with the visual language of local construction companies. Growing up in Austria and Switzerland, the logos and graphics we would typically see at construction sites belong to firms like Hilti and Röfix.
So although we did not work with any specific references, we can imagine that the aesthetics of local construction companies may have unconsciously found their way into our type design. And while we do not know the historical roots of many visual identities in construction and heavy industry, we would not be surprised if some of them could ultimately be traced back to the constructivist movement of the 1920s that you mentioned.
But also looking at it more generally, the connection makes a lot of sense to us. Constructivism was in many ways about reducing form to its simplest geometry, which is similar to what we were doing with Sticks. So maybe the resemblance is not coincidental at all.
Sticks looks appropriate for high-tech products, or computer games. Did you have any particular applications in mind when you designed it?
Yes, we could absolutely imagine Sticks working well for high-tech products, computer games, but also electronic music and other fields where a technical, precise, and forward-looking feel is appropriate. More broadly, we believe Sticks works best in applications where the typeface itself contributes meaningfully to a visual identity. The design has a strong enough character to do real communicative work, signalling particular values and evoking a certain atmosphere beyond simply carrying information.
The fact that Sticks is also a variable font adds another layer to this. It allows for more dynamic applications in digital environments, where the font can be animated along its weight axis. We think this broadens the typeface’s usability in exactly those contexts where many tech-focused companies operate.
For us, this also felt like the right opportunity to launch Type Tinker alongside Sticks. Type Tinker (beta) is an online playground for exploring our growing type catalogue, as well as any other font you load into it. It allows users to animate variable fonts and even control typography through hand gestures. The tool is still in development, but you are warmly invited to explore Sticks and other fonts at Type Tinker.