Monotype Corsiva

Monotype Corsiva

Monotype Corsiva was designed in 1995 by Patricia Saunders who was asked by Monotype Corporation to design a typeface for formal occasions after her successful work on the Arial font.

The font is a sloped, serif design, featuring swash capitals and attractive rendering for formal use (Fonts.com, 2013). It is known to be a very charming and elegant typeface making it an appropriate choice for settings such as event invitations, and formal certificates to add sparkle and give a sense of occasion. One of its best qualities is the cursive which achieves a fancy finish without making texts indecipherable.

Inspired by the swash design with characteristic flourishes, Monotype Corsiva was initially designed to be capital letters justifiably as using the font entirely in uppercase can look very heavy whilst its lowercase form is much easier for the reader to digest. For this reason, it is most popularly used in advertising only for logo design and very short advertising texts.  

Another distinguishing feature of Monotype Corsiva is that it is one of the only commonly available fonts which 
contains the Te (a Cyrillic T with three legs) when seen in its Cyrillic form.

Monotype Corsiva is based on a Chancery cursive typeface, an italic type typeface inspired by the style of the early Italian cursives during the renaissance period in the sixteenth century. This letterform comes from the early masters of print who were very well educated in the fine art of calligraphy and illuminated manuscript. ‘Corsiva’ as a letterform was influenced by the work of Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi a scribe popular during the renaissance period in Italy whose contribution to typography is prominent in the rendering of chancery.

Monotype Corsiva was created by the typesetting machines by Monotype Corporation using hot metal to cast individual letters. Thus it is part of the Monotype design foundry. Monotype Corporation also produced a large library of typefaces most of which are familiar today including Arial, Bookman old style and Century gothic. (IDENTIFONT, 2009)

Monotype Corsiva is now a commonly used font for both designers and word software user, incorporated into soft wares such as Microsoft office Suite (Microsoft, 2013).  

Fonts.com, 2013. Monotype Corisva. [Online] 

Available at: http://www.fonts.com/font/monotype-imaging/monotype-corsiva#product_top

[Accessed 13 March 2013].

IDENTIFONT, 2009. Monotype. [Online] 

Available at: http://www.identifont.com/show?LZB+2

[Accessed 13 March 2013].

Microsoft, 2013. Microsoft Typography. [Online] 

Available at: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/family.aspx?FID=33

[Accessed 13 March 2013].