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ABOUT

Maria Chiara Fantini

Maria Chiara Fantini is a graphic designer and letterer in Florence, Italy. In 2019, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Andrea Tartarelli and Maria Chiara Fantini at Zetafonts published a slightly calligraphic Elzevir typeface, Lovelace.

Kitsch (2019, Francesco Canovaro, Andrea Tartarelli and Maria Chiara Fantini) mixes angular medieval elements and old style letterforms.

In 2019, the lapidary typeface family Beatrix Antiqua (Francesco Canovaro) was reworked by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini together with Andrea Tartarelli and Maria Chiara Fantini into a 50-style type system called Monterchi that includes Text, Serif and Sans subfamilies. Monterchi is a custom font for an identity project for a famous fresco in Monterchi, developed under the art directorship of Riccardo Falcinelli.

Tarif (2019) is a typeface family inspired by the multicultural utopia of convivencia---the peaceful coexistence of Muslims, Christians and Jews in tenth century Andalusia that played an important role in bringing to Europe the classics of Greek philosophy, together with Muslim culture and aesthetics. It is a slab serif typeface with a humanist skeleton and inverted contrast, subtly mixing latin zest, calligraphic details, extreme inktraps, and postmodern unorthodox reinvention of traditional grotesque letter shapes. The exuberant design, perfect for titling, logo and display use, is complemented by a wide range of seven weights allowing for solid editorial use and great readability in body text. Matching italics have been designed with the help of Maria Chiara Fantini and Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, while Rania Azmi has collaborated on the design of the arabic version of Tarif, where the humanist shapes and inverted contrast of the Latin letters find a natural connection with modern arabic letterforms.

In 2020, she released Quieta at Italian Type. Quieta is a 12-style humanist serif typeface inspired by the aesthetics of Italian Renaissance and by the empowering history of the painter Artemisa Gentileschi, first woman to be admitted to an Academy of Fine Arts in Italy. Fantini used sharp flat-nib calligraphic strokes to make the letters come alive. Still in 2020, she co-designed Stinger (2020, a 42-style reverse contrast family by Francesco Canovaro, Cosimo Pancini, Andrea Tartarelli and Maria Chiara Fantini). As part of the free font set Quarantype (2020), Maria Chiara Fantini designed Quarantype Uplift (with Cosimo Pancini).

In 2020, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Mariachiara Fantini---with the help of Solenn Bordeau---released Erotique at Zetafonts. Erotique evolved from Lovelace, an earlier Zetafonts typeface. Zetafonts describe this evil serif as follows: it challenges its romantic curves with the glitchy and fluid aestethic of transmodern neo-brutalist typography. Late in 2020, they added Erotique Sans, the sans version of Erotique, also designed by Cosimo Pancini and Maria Chiara Fantini.

In 2021, Maria embarked on a project to create a font based on Antonio Sinibaldi's calligraphic material in Libro d'Ore di Lorenzo de Medici, now in possession of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana di Firenze. Her first rough font was called Antonio. She also studied Raffaello Bertieri's Sinibaldi font done in 1928 at the Nebiolo Type Foundry when she designed her own digital version of Sinibaldi (2021). The latter font was regularized and smoothed in her final typeface in this project, Magnifico (2021).

EXTERNAL LINKS
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INTERNAL LINKS
Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type design in Italy ⦿ Elzevir ⦿ Lapidary typefaces ⦿ Commercial fonts (small outfits) ⦿ Fashion mag typefaces ⦿