Il Conto - An Italian Wine Bar Font

Description

Il Conto is a display face inspired by the Italian wine bar. Not the polished, modern kind, the ones that have been there since the 70s: a narrow room in Bologna, a counter in Milan, a place in Naples where the tables spill out onto the street and the sign has been repainted six times.

It came out of a long look at that world. Hand-painted signage, enamel plaques, faded awnings, the lettering on a bottle of house red that nobody has redesigned in fifty years.

The forms are wide and heavily rounded, with counters dropping out as circles and dots rather than conventional bowls. Crossbars sit low. Everything is built on the same rounded rectangle, so set as a headline it locks into a solid block of colour with small punched-out details doing the work. It's closer to a logotype than a text face, and that's deliberate.

What's included

• Uppercase A to Z, plus a second set of caps on the lowercase keys

• Numerals 0 to 9

• Punctuation, including typographic quotes

• Currency: euro, sterling, dollar, cent, yen

• Maths and symbols: plus, multiply, divide, equal, percent, less, greater, ampersand, asterisk, hash, at, bullet, brackets and braces

• Accented uppercase characters, covering the common Western European set

• Formats: OTF, TTF, WOFF. WOFF2

Where it works

Wine labels, menus, hospitality branding, posters, record sleeves, apparel, packaging and title cards. It's at its best large and tight, with two or three words maximum. It's not built for body copy or small sizes, so pair it with a simple grotesque for anything you actually need people to read.

Compatibility

Works in Adobe Creative Cloud, Figma, Canva, Affinity, Procreate and Microsoft Office.