"I would like to say that it was a straight-lined, well-thought-out process, but to be honest, it was the opposite," says Felix Bonge, about his Levato typeface design. "Actually Levato was my first 'real' typeface and I had to learn everything in a hands-on manner."

Levato started out to be a personal study on the part of Bonge; it was not his intention to develop into a typeface family. "It took me almost four years, a myriad of changes, adaptions and fresh starts to finish my work and be satisfied with it. Though without my professor, Jovica Veljovic, the design would have ended as the personal study as I originally intended," recalls Bonge. "Professor Veljovic continually pushed me to take the design to the next step."

Over time, the personal exploration evolved into a typeface family of five weights from light to black, plus matching italics and many OpenType software features, including ligatures, discretionary ligatures, swashes and alternate characters, ordinals, fractions, superscript and subscript. The result is a design that is ideally suited to advertising headlines in all media, distinctive blocks of display copy and lively magazine spreads.

"The harmony of the design and organic strokes are most satisfying to me," says Bonge. "I like the tension between serious, almost rigid shapes on the one hand and playful, naive letters on the other. These give the design a special character."

The Levato family is available as desktop fonts from the Fonts.com, Linotype.com and ITCFonts.com websites. It is also available as Web fonts from WebFonts.Fonts.com.

Click here to learn more about Levato.

Allan Haley is Director of Words & Letters at Monotype Imaging. Here he is responsible for strategic planning and creative implementation of just about everything related to typeface designs.