A cursive sans in 6 series

The Costa typeface family began life in 1999 as a “corporate typeface”:http://www.zecraft.com for Costa Crociere, an Italian cruise company who still use it for many of their communication needs. The objective was to develop a typeface that allowed all of the material to be easily recognisable despite various stylesheets and layouts. The style of typeface came from the ligatured logotype Costa designed by Landor Associates in 1999. The immediate answer was to design disconnected letters and to add some unusual glyphs such as k, v or E in order to give a unique colour to the text. The idea was to create a sort of mediterranean style of typeface. Using the structure of a somewhat modernised Italian Chancery script to which only the ending serif remained. The serif being more of a flourish creating contrast and referencing the more exotic countries such as those which Costa Crociere present in their catalogs. Costa is a style without neutrality and doesn’t fit comfortably into any typeface classification – this proves to be the novelty of its design as well as guaranteeing its originality.

Costa was designed to be appropriate for any use where you might desire to give an informal look in titling sizes but still need good legibility in small text sizes. In 2004, Costa was launched by Typofonderie as OpenType family, ExtraBold and Demi weights were added.