Synthview: type design & graphic design

Updated october 2013Novecento Sans font family, now with smallcaps. 6 free styles 32 styles, 16 stylistic opentype features, 590 glyphs, 76 supported languages
The best Novecento Sans' friend: Novecento Slab. 2 free styles 32 styles, 16 stylistic opentype features, 590 glyphs, 76 supported languages
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Besides purely creative and æstethic reasons,a wide range of widhts and weights is useful to fine tune your textualcompositions.

The two most common scenarios are:

1. optimising text flow and lines number
You can vary switch from “regular” to “narrow” to adapt to the size of your column in a multicolumn layout, or use a “condensed” version on the mobile version of a website.
2. Applying optical correction depending on the font size
An ultra-light fontface will vanish on small sizes. Switching to a bolder one will preserve the look&feel and optimize legibility. The same for an ultrabold fontface: on smaller sizes it would be better to switch to a lighter one.

Tip: don’t forget to add extra tracking on smaller sizes and subtract it on larger ones. Hereabove +10 is set to the 15pt line and -10 to the 57pt one.

  • Playing with fontface widths allows you to fit your text into narrow columns, or to adapt it dynamically to a smaller device.

  • Weights in MS. Word: Some softwares, such as MS word and OpenOffice, are not able to organize and display font families if they don’t follow the old standard “Regular – Bold – Italic – Bold italic”.
    Furthermore, if a Bold is not associated to Regular, these applications will try to create an ugly fake bold by interpolating the Regular one.
    To avoid this to happen, Novecento fonts will only show the 4 lighter faces per width; the 4 bolder ones will be accessible selecting the “B” icon as it was a classic Bold.

  • OT features crib: if you use any font management tool such as Apple’s FontBook or Linotype’s Font Explorer, you can access anytime a summary and explanation of the Opentype features embedded into the Synthview’s fonts.
    To do so, just select a font from the list and open the “infos” panel.

  • Typography & responsive design
  • Accessing all weights in MS. Word
  • Opentype features crib

about the author

Synthview’s fonts are designed and developed by Jan Tonellato, a freelance Web & Graphic designer, currently living in Paris, France. In love with typography, he attended the 2010 «type design» master class at Poli-Design (Politecnico) in Milan, Italy, and then extended his professional activity to typographic research and design.

His fonts are crafted from a graphic designer’s point of view, to fit designers needs.

Note: The webfont used on this website is PT sans italic.

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Do you have an improvement request or suggestion? Do you want to give some feedback or to talk about type? Please feel free to drop me a line; you’re welcome.