Maestro takes its cue from the Italian chancery cursive of the early sixteenth century. By this time type ruled the publishing world, but official court documents were still presented in calligraphy, in a new formal style of the high Renaissance that was integrated with Roman letters and matched the refined order of type. The copybooks of Arrighi and others, printed from engraved wood blocks, spread the Italian cancellaresca across Europe, but the medium was too clumsy and the size too small to show what was really happening in the stroke. Arrighi and others also made metal fonts that pushed type in the direction of calligraphy, but again the medium did not support the superb artistry of these masters or sustain the vitality in their work. As the elegant sensitive moving stroke of the broad pen was reduced to a static outline, the human quality, the variety and the excitement of a living act were lost. Because the high level of skill could not be reproduced, the broad pen was replaced by the pointed tool. The modern italic handwriting revival is based on a simplified model and does not approach this formal calligraphy with its relationship to the Roman forms.
Maestro is the font that Arrighi would have made if they had had digital technology. Like the calligraphic system of the papal chancery on which it is based, it was not drawn as a single finished alphabet, but evolved from a confluence of script and Roman. As its original designers intended, it works with simple Roman capitals and serifs or swash capitals and baroque flourishes. The broad pen supplies weight and substance to the stroke which carries energy through tension in balanced s-curves. Above all it is meant to convey the life and motion of formal calligraphy as a worthy counterbalance to the stolid gravity of metal type.
The Maestro family consists of forty fonts distributed over two weights. The OpenType version compresses the family considerably down to two fonts, regular and bold, each containing the entire character set of twenty fonts, for a total of more than 3350 characters per font. These include a wide variety of stylistic alternates, ligatures, beginning and ending letters, flourishes, borders, rules, and other extras. The Pro version also includes extended linguistic support for Latin-based scripts (Western, Central and Eastern European, Baltic, Turkish, Welsh/Celtic, Maltese) as well as Greek.
For more thoughts on Maestro, its background and character sets, please read the PDF accompanying the family.About the designer:
Canada Type is an independent font development studio based in Toronto. The studio was founded in 2004 by Rebecca Alaccari and Patrick Griffin as a means to create professional type solutions for creative indviduals and departments all over the world. Since its inception, Canada Type has brought forth a comprehensive and popular library of typefaces that accommodate a variety of aesthetic tastes. Alongside Rebecca's and Patrick's original designs and historical revivals, the Canada Type library features typefaces by eminent American calligrapher Philip Bouwsma, Dutch science writer and lifelong type enthusiast Hans van Maanen, American expat writer and classicist Bill Troop, and Canadian type designer Kevin King.
Canada Type also continues to perform project-specific type solutions for a variety of clients, including large publishing houses, telecom and media companies, film production studios, design agencies, ad firms and government agencies. Among Canada Type's clients are instantly recognizable names like the BBC, Disney, ABC, Pixar, New York Times, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, MacLeans, Bell Canada, Rogers, Rethink, Reactor, Leo Burnett, Shaw Communications, Cafe Press, Sobeys, the Canadian Ministry of Transport, the Canadian Armed Forces and the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.
This package contains:
Maestro Pro Regular, Maestro Pro Bold
Copyright © 2011 Canada Type. All rights reserved. Maestro™ is a trademark of Canada Type.
Reset
