Cattivo

Wooden saloons. Tumbleweed. Massive steam locomotives. And sand, lots of sand. This is the world that Cattivo might emerge from: a frontier-proof slab-serif face that feels at home in the epic tales of your favorite Spaghetti Westerns. Cattivo builds upon the heritage of horizonal-stress wood type, but wants to be taken with a grain of salt. It is more of a tongue-in-cheek reinterpretation than a faithful revival. Modern, sleek curves and contemporary proportions make sure that it’ll be a useful design tool far beyond the Old West era.

Cattivo’s most striking feature is its horizontal stress, sometimes called reverse contrast. This typographic tradition is rooted in the early 19th century, when display-size slab serif faces started to “reverse” the conventional stroke contrast, combining bold horizontal strokes and equally fat serifs with light, even tender verticals. The new genre was christened “Italienne”. It was a means to an end—that is, gaining attention in an ever more saturated market of loud and goudy typefaces. Such faces weren’t suitable for long copy and they certainly weren’t meant to be. This is exactly where Cattivo scores.

As its name suggests, Cattivo is a Western badass and relishes the horizontal stress principle. Yet, this typographic outlaw doesn’t go full villain. Instead, it shifts down a steam engine gear. Each of its nine weights is carefully drawn, taking it easy with the reverse contrast. This reduced contrast makes Cattivo more legible and evenly textured than most Italienne-style slabs. The horizontal stress is clearly visible from Thin to Black, but it never dominates the typographic image. It’ll allow you to infuse your designs with the frontier spirit of yore while speaking the intermedial visual language of the here and now.

What’s more, Cattivo comes with a full set of independently drawn, real italics. With a dynamic, handwriting-inspired construction, they are a rare feature in this genre. Endowed like this, the entire font family becomes quite versatile. Cattivo is up and ready for body text you wouldn’t normally expect an Italienne in.

Cattivo’s set of almost 700 glyphs comes with useful features such as oldstyle and lining figures (oldstyle, proportional, tabular, boxed and circled), slashed zero, arrows (plain and circled), a beautiful № sign, a one-story “a” in the uprights, and extensive language support. The full family consists of 9 weights plus 9 italics, with “Thin” styles that are rarely found in this genre.

An Identity Letters release true to its name, this typeface is especially suited to brand identity and packaging design—think travel, food, leisure, entertainment, cooking, dining, gifts, and games … in fact, any field that will benefit from a typeface with an offbeat and slightly ironic character. Naturally, Cattivo is particularly recommended for anything cinema or Western-related.

Thanks to its diligent design, Cattivo works equally well in print (e. g., editorial, poster, and book design) and on screen (e. g., in UI/UX design, in apps and on websites, in digital advertising and in ebooks).

Book this ride on the steam train and start exploring uncharted territories. With Cattivo, you too will be ready for the next gold rush.