❶ Introduction
❷ Research
❸ Construction
❹ Resources
❺ Kerning
➏ Proofing
➐ Interpolation
❽ Originality issue
➒ Conclusion
19.06.2026
Bivacco — The Making Of
➊ If you are reading this, you probably don't know me: I am Maria Vittoria, a graphic designer with a passion for typography.
Let me say this first: I know there are many people who draw letters better than me and who are proper type designers; they have my complete admiration and respect. This project was my first approach to type design and this article tells the story on how, in the last months, I committed to create a typeface as a self-taught. In actual fact, I wasn’t completely self-taught. In November 2024 I attended the short course of type design at CFP Bauer, under the guidance of Anna Damoli, Beatrice D’Agostino and Antonella Sartorelli. This led me, by January 2025, to a font with basic Latin upper and lower cases and numbers. A geometric grotesque with a few slightly crooked curves, no diacritics and an acceptable spacing.
Just one year after starting the course, in November 2025, I managed to find some spare time and invest €300 in purchasing a Glyphs licence. And that's when the fun began.
➋ The primary influence on Bivacco was, of course, mountain architecture, in particular alpine huts and bivouacs.
The initial phase focused on studying and analysing the architectural lines of several huts. These include Bivacco Kanin, Bivacco Fanton, and Bivacco Corradini, which stand out for their striking diagonal and angular features, but also Bivacco Locatelli, which is characterised by much more rounded lines.
The bivouacs embody the challenge of minimal living in extreme conditions, and it was precisely the essentiality of the functional requirements and the radical nature of the solutions that fascinated me. Declined in a multitude of abstract forms, they are totally emancipated from any attempt at mimicry with the environment and, on the contrary, aim at pure spatial and structural rationalisation.
[Photo by Janez Martincic]
[Photo by Pietro Savorelli]
[Photo by Deltino Sisto Legnani]
[Wikimedia Commons]
➌ From the very beginning, the research set the overall mood of the typeface, which echoes the main geometric lines of these structures, mixing curved lines with straight shapes, smooth details and sharp angles.
Precisely from Bivacco Kanin and Fanton I derived a fundamental feature of the typeface. Observing the architectures, I noticed a discontinuity in the line, which breaks at a certain point and changes direction. This detail became the cut-into curve of many of the lowercase letters, such as “a”, “e” and “c”.
This tiny addition caused me a fair amount of nerve-wracking, because it was really difficult to figure out where to cut the letter (for example, if on the right or left side), while maintaining an adequate stroke without ruining the curves.
My initial idea was to create an actual “step” within the letterform by drawing two straight lines that met at a sharp vertex (just like in the architecture of those bivouacs), effectively filling in part of the curve. As you can imagine, though, the result didn’t work: it created an area that was too visually heavy, throwing off the balance and proportions of the glyphs.
After a lot of attempts, the solution was to maintain a single cut at an angle of 50° (positive or negative) and to keep the curves above that very gentle and almost flat. The same cut was maintained on the ascenders at the top of the stem (in this case, it was much simpler, as cutting was enough).
In letters such as “n”, “m”, “r” and “u” the intersection between the vertical stem and the curve was refined by working on the so-called pinch contrast.
With that, I continued working on the structural elements of the glyphs, introducing diagonals. These are pretty evident in letters like “v”, “y” and “w” (and also in the uppercase counterparts); these feature especially jumps out in text layouts, creating an interesting and unexpected rhythm with few blank spaces. By integrating these peculiar details into a familiar framework — a monolinear geometric sans serif — they become more easily accepted as part of the system. In fact, the font also incorporates several features typical of grotesques, including 90° terminals that play nicely with its strong emphasis on straight lines.
Moving to uppercases, I soon realised that they needed to be kept simpler. Therefore, in addition to the diagonals mentioned above, all sharp letters (such as “H”, “K”, “T”, but also “D”, “P" or “R”) have a beveled edge in the top left corner. Curved letters, such as “C” or “G”, have the additional cut-into curve, just as their lowercase counterparts.
➍ Starting from this base (but not without a few adjustments along the way), the self-taught phase began: punctuation, diacritics, symbols, foreign letters and kerning. I wanted to produce a typeface that was more or less complete and usable in a fair range of languages.
For any not-yet-type designers who, with a healthy dose of recklessness and curiosity, want to start tinkering around, here are the (almost) completely free resources I have been using. But first, a disclaimer: there are already several websites that catalogue and collect all kinds of assets, first of all Type Design Resources, but also this Collletttivo webpage. Anyway, this is my personal list.
- Blaze Type Guide: How to design fonts?
Good for beginners, it includes various tips on how to design letters. I recommend the more affordable digital version.
[This is the only paid resource I will mention]. - Grilli Type Guides
I especially suggest GT Academy, which is really comprehensive and useful. - Type Design Class
You should also follow on Instagram! - Type Today Manuals
Few but good resources. - Polish Diacrtics: How to?
- Micro-Typography: How To Space And Kern Punctuation Marks And Other Symbols
- Type@Cooper's Herb Lubalin Lecture Series Youtube Playlist
Not a collection of practical resources, but a series of webinars held by some of the most knowledgeable type designers. - Font Review Journal
The name speaks for itself. - Kerning Pairs by Andre Fuchs
Most useful resource I found on kerning.
Obviously, I will avoid mentioning all the free materials provided by Glyphs. The amount of content that has been produced to facilitate the use of the software and of the discipline is truly admirable. I also suggest keeping an eye on foundry blogs and, of course, reading books and academic literature.
This collection helped me produce a typeface with 524 glyphs and broad Latin Extended coverage, supporting more than 100 languages across Europe, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas — including Esperanto, Sami languages, and numerous African orthographies!
➎ At this stage, I turned to kerning. I did it entirely manually, as I couldn’t afford the €200 or more required to buy Kern On, a plug-in that do the work for you in a few minutes (the price was too high for me, especially considering that this project is my first attempt at type design and I’m not sure where it might lead).
That said, it was by far the most time and energy-intensive part of the process. It took me five months to complete (I worked on this project in my spare time whilst having a full-time job), and it was often stressful: you invest a huge amount of effort while feeling as though you’re not making any real progress.
There isn’t much mystery to it: kerning largely consists of reviewing long passages of text and spotting the letter pairs that need adjustment. My advice is simple: start by following the instructions on the Glyphs page to understand the fundamentals (the key is to define your kerning groups with great care!) and then work through the combinations methodically. For example: lowercase to lowercase, uppercase to uppercase, uppercase to lowercase, punctuation paired with letters, etc.
Another valuable resource, as mentioned above, is the GitHub repository by Andre Fuchs, created for type designers who seek comprehensive sample texts to achieve the most complete kerning possible. The repo combines three main sources:
- pairs already used in existing fonts, by analyzing around 2,700 fonts from the Google Fonts Archive;
- “potential” pairs, generated combinatorially from the schematic shape of glyphs;
- pairs that actually appear in real texts, by counting occurrences in about 1 GB of text taken from Wikipedia in 24 languages.
The final result consists of ready-to-use files ordered by relevance. The author explicitly states that, in many cases, the first 1,000–2,000 pairs already provide good coverage.
Put simply, it’s a project designed to answer the question: ‘Which pairs do I actually need to work on to achieve good kerning without wasting months of work?’
Lastly, I strongly recommend GapFinder and KernCrasher scripts from mekkablue: they streamline the process significantly by automatically opening new tabs with kerning pairs that have either excessive spacing or are too tight; truly a game changer.
➏ Once spacing and kerning have been refined on screen, print proofing remains a fundamental stage in type design: when a typeface is printed, its forms are perceived under real reading conditions. Factors such as paper texture and ink spread can significantly influence the appearance of letterforms. Elements that seem balanced on a monitor may appear too heavy, too light, too narrow, or uneven.
In the case of Bivacco, many of the distinctive features embedded within the letterforms — most notably the cuts and interruptions applied to curved glyphs — tend to lose their visual impact as the type size decreases. While these details contribute significantly to the font’s identity at larger scales, they become progressively less noticeable in smaller text sizes. As a result, those expressive qualities are best appreciated when there is sufficient space for them to remain clearly visible. For this reason, it can be argued that Bivacco performs at its best when used as a display typeface.
➐ The interpolation phase followed, with the intention of developing a set of additional weights — including Regular, Medium, and Bold — and possibly their matching Italic versions. The Glyphs Learn page on the subject was extremely clear and helpful, and the process seem more straightforward than I had anticipated, even if it still required a considerable amount of work. Since I can only dedicate time to the project here and there, I decided to stop at this stage and let Bivacco finally see the light of its first release. That said, I’m not ruling out coming back to this later and updating this article accordingly; Bivacco may be just a font for now, but one day it might become a proper typeface.
❽ Looking back at the initial phases of the process, I realised that, as often happens, I had not actually designed anything new.
As stated in the article “Originality in Type Design” by Typotheque1, “type design operates under one fundamental constraint: as original as you may want your design to be, an ‘A’ must still be recognisable as an ‘A’ when you are done with it”. And that’s also the reason why there are many typefaces resembling each other. “Claiming complete originality in type design (or any creative discipline) can be seen as either naive ignorance, or historical amnesia, since we learn by absorbing influences in the world around us. Achieving the dictionary definition of ‘original’ (‘not dependent on other people’s ideas’) is unrealistic.”
To prove this, completely by chance, I’ve found two typefaces (so far) that resemble the construction of Bivacco — and I swear I didn't know they existed. Although these have nothing to do with mountain architecture, the overall style is similar and sometimes almost astonishing.
The first one is Superspitze by The Designers Foundry2. The similarities are mainly in the lowercase letters: the “b” is quite impressive, the “e” follows the same logic but with the cut positioned differently, and the “m” and “n” are also reminiscent of those in my font.
The second is Horseferry, a typeface produced for the rebranding of Channel 4 back in 20153. Quoting the Typeroom article linked above, Horseferry “is occasionally spiky, sometimes smooth, sometimes goes against the grain, doesn’t always follow type rules”, just as Bivacco. Here too, the “e” features the same cut, only more pronounced, while “a”, “n”, and “r” follow an equivalent logic.
[Image by Patrick Martin]
[Image by Typeroom]
❽ So, what did I learn? Type design is an exercise in patience. What I love about it is that it’s not a scientific and objective science: of course rules matters, but every project lives off a lot of exceptions and optical corrections. It’s all about staring at the screen for hours and hours until you realise what’s wrong with that “o”.
Designing a typeface requires a lot of time, and it is potentially never-ending (you will always be tempted to go back and modify that curve). I have put a lot of effort into this project, and even though I have studied reliable resources, I have probably made a ton of mistakes that I haven't noticed. I know I still have a lot to learn, but one has to start somewhere.
For this reason, I hope this article will encourage typography enthusiasts to take the leap and try their hand at this field: it is not as scary as it seems.
Bivacco is now available as a free download for personal use. Feel free to explore it, test it, and make it your own — I hope it brings as much enjoyment to your projects as it did to mine during its development.
Above all, if you have any feedback, opinions, suggestions or advice, I look forward to hearing from you. Feel free to get in touch at: mariavittorianavati@gmail.com
Download Bivacco
- Peter Biľak, “Originality in Type Design”, Typotheque, July 4, 2023, typotheque.com.
- The Designers Foundry, “Superspitze” by Patrick Martin
- “Neville Brody’s Channel4 fonts are the most talked about of the month”, TypeRoom, November 2, 2015, typeroom.eu.