ITC Bodoni is one of the most carefully researched and accurate interpretations of Bodoni’s typefaces ever attempted. The process involved two trips to Parma, Italy, and hundreds of hours of research. Then, thousands of hours more were spent carefully designing fonts, using an original copy of Bodoni’s 1818 Manuale Tipografico as a benchmark for accuracy.
The first step was a trip to Parma by the four-person design team to study, first hand, Bodoni’s work. In the words of Sumner Stone, the project’s art director, “The search for Bodoni took on a new dimension and meaning. We were there not only to look at old books and old metal punches. We traveled to Parma to find the spirit of Bodoni – the real Bodoni.”
Design Pilgrims
In addition to Stone, the Bodoni design team included Holly Goldsmith, Jim Parkinson, and Janice Prescott Fishman. After Parma, the band of type pilgrims returned home to draw letters. The Romans were first. The small size (ITC Bodoni Six), based on the font Bodoni called “Filosofia,” required a good deal of interpretation. The challenge here was to preserve the feeling and gesture of the original Bodoni letters sculpted on the end of a bar of steel, without making a mock-antique design that incorporated every bump and lump. The end result, according to Stone, is “grouchy, not photo-realistic.”
The large design (ITC Bodoni Seventy-Two) is based on Bodoni’s “Papale” font. In this case, the goal was to capture the engraved elegance of the 18th century master’s work without reducing the characters to oversimplified geometric shapes.
ITC Bodoni Twelve was developed as an electronic interpolation between Bodoni Six and Bodoni Seventy-two. Because the differences between the two are so vast, the design team was skeptical about the outcome of such an experiment. When completed, however, all agreed that the new design was an extraordinarily good interpretation of Bodoni’s larger text fonts.
The end result of all this careful labor is both remarkable and unique among Bodoni revivals. No other design quite compares – unless it is the original fonts cut by Giambattista himself.