We are delighted to introduce ‘Stanley’ a new compact family designed by Ludovic Balland. Inspired by one of the most classic typefaces of the 20th century, ‘Times New Roman’, by Stanley Morison, ‘Stanley’ combines a strong graphic personality with solid functional qualities. The result is a font which can distinctly perform a great range of duties.

Based in Basel, Ludovic Balland is an established graphic designer enjoying international recognition. He is particularly well known for his bold graphic design work for books and posters. It is with the same impulse and energy that he created ‘Stanley’. 

Sharing comparable qualities with its inspirational precursor, ‘Stanley’ offers excellent legibility and incredible sharpness at very small sizes. With five cuts, ‘Stanley’ can fulfill versatile needs, from footnotes to headlines. The distinct details in the drawing give a unique tone to any text.

[Stanley is now available as @font-face through webINK]

We are proud to announce that the Jan Tschichold Award, granted by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, goes this year to our friend and colleague François Rappo. Congratulations from all of us at Optimo!

Dedicated for outstanding book design achievement, the award recognizes François Rappo's involvement in this field as a theoretician and an educator, and above all, as a typographer and a type designer.

His work contributes to the development of contemporary type design, and also takes part of the history of typography as many of his types are the revision of rare and forgotten type styles, based on deep historical and technical investigations. 
More details can be found at swissdesignawards.ch

In 2004, Optimo published François Rappo's first typeface family, the now classic Didot Elder. Since then, a series of beautiful designs have followed such as Theinhardt, Genath and CEO which have appealed to a wide international audience. François has also designed custom types for The New York Times Magazine, or more recently Vogue Hommes International. Two more new types, Plain Grotesque and Orso, will be available this year. Stay tuned!

For its 10th anniversary, we gifted our well-known typeface ‘Hermes’ with a new condensed version, available in three styles perfect for dealing with dense graphic environments.



Avoiding overly sophisticated adjustments, the compact forms of this savvy typeface recall simple geometrical shapes and low contrasted strokes from its original design. Intended to work well in long texts and at small sizes, the spacing has been widened. This brings also a high quality level when used as a webfont.



The case covers the same full Latin A language, small caps, proportional/tabular figures, arbitrary fractions and case-sensitive variants as its previous version. It also includes 100 additional glyphs, featuring small caps figures, ordinal lowercases, superiors/inferiors lowercases and figures.



With this new condensed version and all the necessary opentype features, the Hermes family widens its abilities for future graphic applications.

[Hermes Condensed will be available as @font-face through webINK, soon]

Genath Sans, a custom version of Genath Display, was designed for the exclusive use of Vogue Hommes International. Sharing its first cover with Stephanie Seymour, Genath Sans is used alongside Genath throughout the magazine, art directed by Patrick Roppel.