Caratteri aldo novarese biography

Aldo Novarese

Italian designer, 1920-1995, who designed most of his typefaces at Nebiolo in Turin. Until 1975, he made about 30 families at Nebiolo, and after 1975, he produced about 70 further families of fonts. With weights included, he created about 300 fonts. Biography by Sergio Polano. He was very influential, and wrote two important books, Alfa Beta: Lo Studio e il Disegno del Carattere, a study on font design and history (1964), and Il Segno Alfabetico (1971). Essay by Sergio Polano on Novarese. The list of fonts done at Nebiolo:

• Landi Linear (1942). This was revived in digital form in 2011 by Toto as K22 Landi Linear.
• Etruria (1940-42)
• Express (1940-43)
• Normandia (1946-49, with Butti, and 1952)
• Athenaeum Initials (with A. Butti, 1945-1947)
• Fluidum (+Bold) (1951, script). Revived by Ralph Unger as Butti (2011).
• Fontanesi (1951-54, an all caps rococo font). Digital revivals include Fontanesi RMU (2018, Ralph M. Unger) and Fontanesi (2003, a free font by Frogii).
• Microgramma (1952, with A. Butti; available at URW++). This was done as an alternative to
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  Unveiling Nebiolo’s history

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  While Nebiolo’s core business was the manufacture of printing presses, today the company is especially remembered for its contributions in the field of typeface design. Its type design office (later called Studio Artistico) was set up in the early 1930s and in the following decades released influential typefaces that shaped the history of Italian typography. The name of Aldo Novarese, who headed the studio from 1952 to 1972 after Alessando Butti (1936–1952) and Giulio Da Milano (c. 1933–1936), is almost synonymous with Nebiolo. Being its last leading figure, Novarese remained the only source for historians after the foundry’s demise in 1978 and the ensuing dispersion of its archives.

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  Rendering of the Nebiolo factory in Turin, Italy from an advertisement printed in an 1889 issue of Arte della Stampa. Image from Marta Bernstein.

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  Photograph of Nebiolo employees taken when the company’s new factory on the Via Bologna in T

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  Aldo: as Ferrari is to cars, Novarese is to type

  Aldo Novarese is one of the most prolific type designers of the 20th century, having designed over 100 type families—some 30 of these at Nebiolo—and influenced the design landscape of mid-century Italy and beyond. His professional career, first as a draftsman at Nebiolo, then as their artistic director from 1952–1975, and later continuing as a freelance designer, can be followed by reference to his exceptionally diverse oeuvre of typefaces. Yet not much is known about his personal life. Reserved and shy, he wanted his work to speak for him as a whole; he was designing type until well into his seventies.

  Novarese was born on June 29, 1920, in the small town of Pontestura in the Piedmont region of Northern Italy. His father worked as a customs officer in Turin, where the family later moved. Novarese was introduced to printing and typography at early in his youth. In 1931, at only 11 years of age, he attended the vocational middle school for printing, Scuola Artieri Stampatori, and learned about graphic and printing techniques such