Charles Gibbons and Cindy Kinash’s Ciao Bella family pairs the funky elegance of a hand-drawn copperplate script with a bouquet of ornament fonts. Ciao Bella’s expansive range of alternate opening and closing forms, word-connecting ribbons, and swash characters use the power of OpenType to create a genuinely hand-lettered look. Bursting with over 2,000 characters, the Ciao script mates broad linguistic support with expressive possibilities galore in an easy-to-use software experience.

But then there are the ornaments! What’s truly innovative about Ciao Bella’s ornaments is that most of the characters come in pairs that can be set in multiple colors without any stacking, layering, or aligning. They work in any application that supports kerning — even most word processors. See the slideshow and Gallery link above to see how they work.

Ciao Bella marries the best of the old world — the warm, classic feel of ink on paper — and the new — the amazing capabilities of “smart” OpenType fonts — in a union that’s sure to delight.