Perfect Roman

For a long time, I’ve wanted to create my own unique typeface, inspired by the lapidary style used in ancient Rome.
So I finally embarked on the journey that led to the humble result you can find on MyFonts.

Comparison of the typeface with the inscription preserved in the Archaeological Museum of Padua and dedicated to Titus Iestinus Augurinus. The proportions seem consistent.

To shape its appearance, I examined hundreds of drawings, from modern reinterpretations to original inscriptions of the period, trying to bring to light the ideas underlying the construction of the Roman lapidary.

Drawing of the letter A with optical corrections

Of course, there is no unique “Roman alphabet”: the inscriptions vary depending on the location, the era, and even from one line to the next. Behind this observation, however, recurring proportions, harmonious relationships, and formal solutions emerge and give the letters a solidity and a timeless elegance that we still perceive as harmonious today.

The goal, therefore, was not to faithfully reproduce a single inscription, but to reconstruct that design spirit: a typeface that was historically credible, without sacrificing the legibility and versatility required of a contemporary font.

The result is a design that seeks not to be a copy of the past, but rather a dialogue with it: an attempt to reinterpret Roman lapidary capitals through the tools and needs of digital typography.

An example of text

Each glyph was designed to avoid personal interpretations and typically modern compositional solutions, seeking instead to appear as the natural evolution of the original designs of the time. Many of the forms arose from comparing inscriptions from different eras and areas of the Empire. In some cases, it was necessary to reconstruct incomplete letters or deduce the construction logic of glyphs documented in only a few examples. Consider, for example, modern numbers, currency symbols, or letters not belonging to the Latin alphabet, such as J, K, U, Eszett, and Eth.

The different variations of the font

The project was finally extended to the Greek alphabet, applying the same construction principles to obtain a consistent look with the Latin capitals.

Roman letters, engraved in stone, have survived two thousand years. This project is my way of continuing their journey into the world of digital typography.