Nitti Font Family
Nitti Font Family Name
Without a doubt, Nitti Mostro is the boldest family in our Nitti series yet. And the most fun.
Eighteen styles in total – beefy, dazzling, flashy, and rough – max out the Grotesque-inspired theme Pieter van Rosmalen put up with Stanley, Nitti, Nitti Typewriter, and Nitti Grotesk – a collection of what we have dubbed ‘Italo-American Grotesques’.Nitti Mostro is based on the heaviest weights of Nitti Grotesk but geared to daring display uses: posters, banners, t-shirts, stickers, signs, mugs, you name it. To allow for very compact line spacing, ascenders and descenders have been kept as short as possible. The letter fit is extremely tight for which some Nitti-typical forms had to be altered.The series is divided into four sub-families: Nitti Mostro with nine styles varying from Gradient to Chrome; Nitti Mostro Comic – a slightly rounded version; Nitti Mostro Disco – the radiant party variant; and Nitti Mostro Stencil – solid or rough. All styles in these sub-families can be layered for vibrant, colorful effects or shading. (We can’t wait to see all the animations and mouse-over effects you’ll come up with for Nitti Mostro on the web:) A fun extra are the nine cute monster pictograms drawn by Dirk Uhlenbrock.Nitti Mostro complements the other members of the Nitti series, but at the same time is a design in its own bombastic right. Either way, it is the variant that fits the typefaces’eponymist most appropriately: Frank ‘The Enforcer’ Nitti. FoundryDesignersPieter van RosmalenMore Info.
Pulls off something I didn’t think could be done: it’s a neo-Grotesque that is comfortable to read.The famous and infamous Helvetica looks strong and dramatic in display, but has problems with readability. In a typeface, comfortable reading is promoted by even “color” (meaning an even density of gray) and a fairly regular rhythm of vertical strokes across the word. The even rhythm is accomplished partly by having the white spaces within letters — the counters — balance the white spaces between letters. In Helvetica you have wide letters, such as the circular ‘o’, and tight letter spacing, and the rhythm gets uneven. If you try to remedy the rhythm by spacing letters with those same proportions more widely, the words can fall apart visually.What Pieter van Rosmalen has done with Nitti Grotesk is to narrow the Grotesque forms and loosen the spacing, while keeping the relatively monoline and closed style of Helvetica and its cousins.
Nitti Font Family Tree
In van Rosmalen’s hands, this has resulted in the strikingly even rhythm of the typeface. It comes with both (default) two-story and one-story ‘g’ and ‘a’ as variants. Getting all the forms to balance beautifully, with even rhythm, is one of the big challenges in type design, and Nitti Grotesk pulls it off particularly well. The result is an attractive, strong workhorse sans for comfortable reading.William Berkson is a philosopher and type designer. His revival is available from Font Bureau.