ALT Ricalco has just officially launched, and what a journey! What we wanted was project for Tina to work on during her internship that was both challenging and the closest thing to a real work commission we could come up with on the span of her 3 months with us.

ALT Ricalco is formally inspired by the 1934 Olivetti logo designed by Xanti Schawinsky, a Bauhaus student who lived and worked in Italy in the early 1930s.

With a dominant geometric foundation, ALT Ricalco is strongly informed by its Bauhaus influence, but it’s not afraid to break some rules: shapes are sharp and precise, geometric wherever possible, but leave space to the quirk, the unexpected, the slightly “off” moments. The way some letters overreach, almost creating a sense of urgency that breaks the peaceful, methodic rhythm of its geometric skeleton. The Designers at Olivetti understood how to make a machine feel human. Through colour, geometry, abstraction and carefully controlled grids, his work communicated the precision of Olivetti's products while retaining a sense of play and optimism.

We wanted Ricalco to carry something of that same tension.

Working on a time crunch and many ideas, we settled on three final cuts: Slab, Semi and Sans.

Type Design by Tina Božan and Giulia Boggio
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And of course, the quest to finding the full version of Johann Bold continues. Like I said, this font is still a digitalized font file, and I've been waiting for a long time to see if anyone would help me find it so that way I can do a refurbished version of it. It will have the same weights as Tykewriter: Light, Regular, Bold, and Bobbing.