Designed by Francesco Canovaro with help from Andrea Tartarelli and Maria Chiara Fantini, Kitsch is a typeface happily living at the crossroads between classical latin and medieval gothic letterforms. But, rather than referencing historical models like the italian Rotunda or the french Bastarda scripts, Kitsch tries to renew both its inspirations, finding a contemporary vibe in the dynamic texture of the calligraphic broad-nib pen applied to the proportions of the classical roman skeleton. The resulting high contrast and spiky details make Kitsch excel in display uses, while a fine-tuned text version manages to keep at small sizes the dynamic expressivity of the design without sacrificing legibility. Both variants are designed in a wide range of weights (from the almost monolinear thin to the dense black), and are fully equipped with a extended character sets covering over two hundred languages that use latin, cyrillic and greek alphabets.
Special care has been put in designing Kitsch italic letterforms, with the broad-nib movements referencing classical italian letterforms to add even more shades to your typographic palette. The resulting alternate letter shapes have also been included in the roman weights as Stylistic Alternates – part to the wide range of Open Type features (Standard and Discretionary Ligatures, Positional Numerals, Small Caps and Case Sensitive Forms) provided with all the 32 weights of Kitsch.
Born for editorial and branding use, Kitsch is fashionable but solid, self-confident enough to look classic while ironic enough to be contemporary.
