Matteo is a family of geometric sans serif fonts. Designer Diana Ovezea has given the family an Italian name so that users might call fast cars to mind when they see it. The family includes 14 styles; there are seven weights, ranging from Thin to Bold. Each of these includes a companion italic. Matteo’s italics have an extreme angle (15º), which is quite unusual for a sans serif design. These italics are oblique in form, with a single-storey ‘a’ in place of the upright’s double-storey ‘a’. Matteo is an excellent selection for use in editorial and corporate identity designs, as well as advertising or annual reports. The shapes of its letterforms, as well as their spacing, have been optimized to create a pleasant reading experience, even in longer texts. The most prominent feature of the typeface is its geometric construction, which is based on circles and ovals. Letterforms in all seven of the weights are based on the same skeleton, with the ‘O’ maintaining its circular proportions (this makes Matteo’s lighter weights feel wider than its heavier ones). Several of Matteo’s letterforms include sharp corners, e.g., the ‘A’, ‘N’, ‘M’, ‘V’, ‘W’, and ‘Z’, as well as in the numerals ‘2’, ‘3’, and ‘7’. The capital ‘T’, ‘E’, ‘F’, and ‘Z’ each feature slightly angled endings on their horizontal strokes. Three special characters are particularly noteworthy in terms of their design: ¶, ≠, and &. Each font includes four sets of numerals, as well as a full range of subscript and superscript figures for typesetting factions. The period, comma, colon, and semicolon have the same width in each of the family’s 14 fonts; this allows users to set tables more easily. The fonts are also ‘logo-ready’, with extensive kerning having been defined even between the lowercase and uppercase letters. This enables the easy typesetting of CamelCase terms, like ‘SonVender’, ‘eTones’, ‘MunYan’, etc., without any ugly gaps appearing between lowercase and uppercase letters.
