Marista - my second professional font!

It has been over a year since I released my last font. This new one, Marista, has actually been sat on my hard disk for over 9 months so it is about time it saw the light of day! You can take a look at the interactive previews here: http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/zephyris/marista/

Marista is a bit of an unusual design. It is a monospaced font meaning every symbol is equal in width (like found on a typewriter; Courier is the classic example) but unlike most monospaced fonts it is designed to be a stylistic cursive script, within the constraints of the even letter width. It is actually based on a real and popular typewriter font used in the 1960s-70s, and I designed it to try and capture some of the light irregularities which characterise real typewritten fonts rather than their computer equivalents. The name itself is a derived from Maritsa, the name of the major Bulgarian typewriter company; it was a Maritsa typewriter sample which first introduced me to this text style.

It is a very distinctive, yet readable, font and I designed it with the intention to be used in a block of text. Both normal and italic variants are available, though the original typewriter fonts are more similar to the italic. At very large scales the subtle irregularities which make it look authentically typewritten can look awkward, but in a block of text this slight irregularity really captures the typewritten feeling. Try writing your next letter or invitation in it!

Software used:

Inkscape: Outline design
FontForge: Glyph coding and font generation