Forte Forward
Tabular Type Foundry · Kris Sowersby · 2022
A scholarly revival of Monotype's 1962 Forte, released to mark the typeface's 60th anniversary, liberating Karl Reißberger's brush script from the square-body constraints of metal type.
About
The original Forte was designed by Karl Reißberger and became ubiquitous through its inclusion in Microsoft Office, but its digital form was compromised by metal type restrictions and early digitisation shortcuts. Forte Forward restores lost ligatures, redesigns characters that were lazily borrowed from Arial in the 1992 digitisation, and corrects stroke modulation to better reflect sign painter's lettering. Old style figures, contextual alternates, three umlaut variants, and Reißberger's own illustration have been added to honour the typeface's Viennese origins.
Classification
A display brush script revival, freed from the constraints of Monotype's original metal type square body requirement. The design draws on sign painter's lettering traditions, with stroke modulation and oval terminals at consistent angles producing a more calligraphically coherent result than the 1962 original.