“Always intrigued by Bodoni’s original work, I was set out -back in 2000- to examine his work and study ‘Manuale Tipografico’, one of the greatest specimen books ever printed. Issued in 1818 at Parma, Italy by Bodoni’s widow, the two-volume work shows an impressive array of 142 roman alphabets and some foreign ones such as Greek and Cyrillic. After a careful examination of all characters, I decided to create a typeface based on the distinct script capitals presented in the book. Matching lowercase italics were later selected and designed to complete the series. Since my intention was not to create simply a digital version of Bodoni’s work, this typeface was designed with connected characters and capitals with extra calligraphic elements.
The result was released in 2002 and published in our award-winning catalog/book ‘IDEA/Trendsetting Typography vol.1’. Later in 2005 we revived a large number of ornaments and borders (credit goes to designer George Lygas). All this work was left behind till recently when it was revisited to create a complete ‘Pro’ family. Several new uppercase and lowercase glyphs were designed in order to create a distinct typeface, which is based on Bodoni but yet it stands out on its own.
The new version also takes care of conflicts between neigbouring letters, something that was not included in the first version. Bodoni Script Pro is a 3-weight superfamily. It supports 10 special opentype features including ‘contextual alternates’ as well as support for both Latin and Greek. Each font comes with 725 glyphs including a large number of alternates as well as 144 ornaments. Furthermore, when you purchase the whole package you get a bonus font which contains 120 frame parts. These parts, when put together, create some truly amazing borders”. -Panos Vassiliou
