MVB Aunt Mildred has a vintage charm that invokes hand-lettered postcards or advertising. Akemi Aoki drew the letterforms with a fine-tip felt pen and named it after her great aunt. Since its release in 1995, Aunt Mildred has been a popular choice for children’s books. Italics and bold weights were recently added, making it even more useful for publications, packaging, and greetings of all sorts.
MVB Bossa Nova is based on unattributed hand-lettering found in an old book, circa 1946. Yet unlike many scripts based on a vintage source, it feels fresh and dynamic. This is due to the skilled hands of Holly Goldsmith, who gave the forms a contemporary vigor despite their age. Alternate glyphs with extended ascenders offer extra flair.
A hand-rendered advertisement for a leather tanner, appearing in a French book from the ’40s, served as inspiration for MVB Bovine. Using its comic sway and slightly exaggerated forms, the typeface delivers bold headlines with a wink and a smile. MVB Bovine is all-caps with a set of discretionary ligatures. It’s available in versions with sharp or rounded corners.
Kanna Aoki was designing fabrics and dishware for several major manufacturers when she designed MVB Cafe Mimi. The design came from a few words Aoki painted as decoration for a set of cappuccino cups. Aoki created the Regular weight for MVB Fonts using a brush. The Bold was adapted after digitization. Using several double-letter ligatures, the fonts can feel as natural and spontaneous as the original hand-painted lettering. Despite its curlicues and free-flowing forms, great care was taken to keep this script balanced and legible. It skips and hops along the baseline but doesn’t lose its step.
Gayle Sato, longtime friend of MVB Fonts, has amazing handwriting. It’s a natural, simple hand, with perfect rhythm. Devoid of flourishes, it doesn’t It’s just genuine, quick, and clean — the handwriting we all wish we had. The digitization by Mark van Bronkhorst captures these qualities. Retaining the roughness of a felt pen, MVB Calliope is a handwriting typeface that feels much more authentic than most, highly legible but still raw. The Regular was released in 2005, with the other weights shortly thereafter.
Mark van Bronkhorst designed MVB Celestia Antiqua at a time when font choice was limited. Design was characterized by overuse of the few fonts that came with laser printers. A rustic typeface, recalling the roughness and irregularity of pre-digital printing, was a response to the cold crispness of DTP. MVB Celestia Antiqua holds its own among a large group of other “weathered” serif fonts, in part due to the size of the family: three weights, small caps, italics, and two titling styles. But it’s also successful because it’s simply drawn well, the contours only as rough as they need to be, enabling text at any size, large or small.
An old book found at a Paris bouquiniste contained samples of the typeface “Caractère de finance,” a bâtarde design by 18th century typefounder Pierre Simon Fournier. Rather than revive the type, Kanna Aoki decided to reinvent it, using a felt pen to achieve a rustic, handwritten quality, departing from the 18th century model as she saw fit. MVB Chanson d’Amour conveys a soulful elegance that stops short of the ostentatious, overwrought found in many formal scripts. It is lovely and sweet, but never saccharine.
Mundane information—the sort you might ignore—often appears in the form of very simple, utilitarian lettering, devoid of personality, the sort of industrial lettering you find on old blueprints, park restrooms, and electrical boxes. MVB Diazo is such a thing. It looks like lettering done earnestly with a plastic template. The monoline caps—constructed from straight lines and simple curves—have rounded details as if rendered by a blunt pen on a topographical survey or by a router on a rustic campground sign. The MVB Diazo fonts are compact, available in two widths: Condensed and Extra Condensed. Each width offers four weights from Light to Black. The fonts are perfect for wherever plain and boring letterforms are required. All widths and weights are also available in two distressed textures (#1 and #2) that accentuate the industrial character of the design. Rough #1 is gritty, with finer texture for use at larger sizes. Rough #2 exhibits more damage, the roughness apparent when used at smaller sizes. The Rough fonts include alternates of a number of glyphs so that variation of texture is possible when letters repeat in a word.
MVB Dovetail is an editorially focused text serif designed by David Sudweeks. The working idea for the typeface came from a design school letter-making exercise: Take a pair of scissors and a few large sheets of paper, and start cutting. The resulting letters and the action itself of cutting them out of paper informed the type design process, producing strong, simple shapes and an open, inviting texture. Dovetail’s tone is crisp and straightforward. Its classic letterforms, set off with a touch of playfulness, give the design both a practical and spontaneous personality. The text weights capably set copy at a variety of sizes for print and render crisply on screen. Its lightest and heaviest weights perform best at display sizes. Care has been taken to save the typographer’s time with OpenType features including contextual punctuation and symbols to fit mixed-case, small-caps, and all-caps settings, as well as figure sets tuned to each use.
MVB Embarcadero lies in a space between grotesque sans serifs and the vernacular signage lettering drawn by engineers. It’s a style that happens to convey credibility and forthrightness without pretense—it’s anti-style, actually. All of this makes for the most versatile of typefaces, capable of delivering any kind of message while staying out of the way. As is often the case with a type design that develops over several years, Embarcadero isn’t the realization of a specific concept. In the ’90s Mark van Bronkhorst began digitizing a blocky slab serif from the Victorian era, which was then set aside for many years. He later revisited the design, paring it down to its bare essentials, and as more time passed, it evolved from a grid-based outline to curves that echoed the rigid skeleton of the original. Eventually it became a complete family with all the readability requirements of a text sans serif, yet maintaining the subtle eccentricities of its inspiration. Functionally, the Embarcadero family is as adaptable as its design. The OpenType Pro set of 20 fonts contains two widths and five weights, each with italics, small caps, a full set of figures, bullets and arrows, and support for most Latin-based languages. In all, Embarcadero is suitable for headlines or text. And—thanks to its simple, square form—it’s ideal for type on screen too.
MVB Embarcadero lies in a space between grotesque sans serifs and the vernacular signage lettering drawn by engineers. It’s a style that happens to convey credibility and forthrightness without pretense—it’s anti-style, actually. All of this makes for the most versatile of typefaces, capable of delivering any kind of message while staying out of the way. As is often the case with a type design that develops over several years, Embarcadero isn’t the realization of a specific concept. In the ’90s Mark van Bronkhorst began digitizing a blocky slab serif from the Victorian era, which was then set aside for many years. He later revisited the design, paring it down to its bare essentials, and as more time passed, it evolved from a grid-based outline to curves that echoed the rigid skeleton of the original. Eventually it became a complete family with all the readability requirements of a text sans serif, yet maintaining the subtle eccentricities of its inspiration. Functionally, the Embarcadero family is as adaptable as its design. The OpenType Pro set of 20 fonts contains two widths and five weights, each with italics, small caps, a full set of figures, bullets and arrows, and support for most Latin-based languages. In all, Embarcadero is suitable for headlines or text. And—thanks to its simple, square form—it’s ideal for type on screen too.
Kanna Aoki drew the letters for MVB Emmascript while on a picnic near the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Mark van Bronkhorst adapted the writing as a font that maintains a very natural scrawl. Later a bold weight was added. MVB Emmascript has been used to add a lighthearted, human touch to everything from fiction paperbacks to potato chip packaging. The typeface is named for Aoki’s 1968 Volkswagen, Emma.
MVB Fantabular proves that monospaced faces needn’t be formal or bland. Inspired by the letterforms of older typewriters, Akemi Aoki designed a playful family of three weights with italics. With every character the same width MVB Fantabular works wherever a monospaced font is needed, but the face is so loose and carefree it hides its fixed pitch construction well, allowing it to be used in other settings too. A sans serif version—MVB Fantabular Sans—is also available.
MVB Fantabular proves that monospaced faces needn’t be formal or bland. Inspired by the letterforms of older typewriters, Akemi Aoki designed a playful family of three weights with italics. With every character the same width MVB Fantabular works wherever a monospaced font is needed, but the face is so loose and carefree it hides its fixed pitch construction well, allowing it to be used in other settings too. MVB Fantabular Sans is the sans serif version of MVB Fantabular.
Reminiscent of the hand-lettering found in mid-century children’s books, Akemi Aoki’s MVB Grenadine is a quirky sans, broken free of its geometric roots. Letterforms bounce along the baseline in a jolly dance, yet remain clear and legible, whatever the reader’s age. MVB Grenadine is available in a broad range of six weights, each with italics.
Kanna Aoki had fairy tales in mind when she designed MVB Greymantle. She drew dots with a felt pen to build up the forms, giving them their particular rough character. The “Extras” font contains a set of whimsical illustrations, including a portrait of Greymantle—her 18-pound cat, a set of curly initial caps, and border parts. MVB Greymantle has been spotted on numerous children’s books, in magazines, in salad dressing advertisements, and on food packaging.
MVB Gryphius is a digitization of uncommon type from an era normally associated with the work of Nicolas Jenson. Produced by Otto Trace, the fonts come from types used by Sebastian Gryphius in Lyon in the early 16th century. The italic appears in a book from 1524 and the roman and small caps appear with the same italic in another book printed by Gryphius in 1541. Retaining the rough contours and uneven texture of its source, MVB Gryphius is best used at text sizes from 12- to 15-point, but its old world character can work in display settings too.
MVB Hotsy Totsy is Akemi Aoki’s first typeface design. Aoki created the letters in cut paper. Once digitized, the design was expanded to offer several weights and styles. Exaggerating the triangular serifs and tapering strokes of “Latin” typefaces, MVB Hotsy Totsy is the perfect party face, appearing frequently on board games, product packaging, and in children’s books. It is named for (what was at the time) a dive bar in Albany, California. The bar has since been renovated but its neon sign was preserved, a local landmark of San Francisco’s East Bay.
Mark van Bronkhorst’s MVB Magnesium is based on his impressions of a style of lettering often seen on early 20th century hand-painted signage. With its thick-thin strokes and angled terminals, MVB Magnesium is a warmer, less common alternative whenever one might use a sans serif in all-caps. It is available in two widths.
A comfortable tuxedo, a bright boutonniere, and a spring in your step. With Magnolia, Mark van Bronkhorst’s aim was to convey a sense of formality without stiffness. The slim lines and swooping vertical strokes cut an elegant figure. But the bouncy serifs, unimposingly low crossbars and relaxed bowls ( It was designed by Mark and released by MvB Design in 1993, and revised for Adobe in 1998. Use Magnolia as a display face, especially at large sizes, anywhere that “high-end” and “humor” are part of the program.
MVB Margin was inspired by an all-caps, monospaced font once used widely on bank statements and utility bills. Mark van Bronkhorst has designed this neutral, utilitarian family to perform as proportional type in modern settings with lowercase, figure sets, and small caps, in weights from Thin to Black, with true italics. MVB Margin has a crisp, technical feel and performs well as printed text, on screen, and at small sizes.
Even if sports aren’t your thing, you might find script varsity lettering from years past to have a certain appeal, perhaps conjuring simpler times. Naive and uneven yet jaunty and legible, such casual scripts, with their requisite underline swooshes, were standard equipment for baseball teams from one-horse towns to the major leagues. To bring this aesthetic to the digital arena, Mark van Bronkhorst began with a vintage iron-on alphabet, redesigning the flocked, overlapping letters to behave as a script typeface, expanding the character set to support all Latin-based languages. Despite its professional skill set, MVB Mascot® retains the unvarnished spirit of its inspiration.
MVB Peccadillo is an interpreted revival of a metal typeface popular in the 19th Century, then known as Skeleton Antique. Highly condensed with extra short descenders, the face makes a big impact in a narrow space. Holly Goldsmith worked from letterpress-printed specimens of 96-point, antique metal type, deliberately retaining subtle distortions due to type wear and letterpress impression. Alan Dague-Greene, referring to printed samples of Skeleton Antique, adapted the design to create two additional optical sizes: “Eight” for smaller text and “Twenty-four” for subheads.
Lettering on a vintage bottle cap served as inspiration for MVB Pedestria. Akemi Aoki’s design is simple and legible, yet full of life, thanks to its loose, casual forms. Two sets of irreverent Pict fonts take characters from ubiquitous public restroom door symbology to a new level, providing playful pictograms for invitations, advertising, and infographics.