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Finding Forte
The Typeface Everyone Knows
Exhibition at the designforum Vienna
28.9.—26.10.2022
Karl Reißberger, who literally designed Forte at his kitchen table in post-war Vienna, was the first Austrian graphic designer to licence a typeface to Monotype in England in the 1950s. In the late 1990s, the typeface found its way into Microsoft Office applications and thus onto millions of desktop computers worldwide.
My book and the exhibition project I curated celebrated a double anniversary in 2022: Forte was published by Monotype Corporation 60 years ago and has been included in Microsoft Office applications for 25 years.
To mark the anniversary, Microsoft released a version of the typeface revised by Toshi Omagari under the title Forte Forward. In addition to revisiting Karl Reißberger’s work, this new edition made it possible to devote part of the exhibition to the future development of the typeface.The exhibition concluded with the presentation of artistic interpretations by 31 international creatives.
Their exploration of Forte’s formal language opened up additional perspectives on typographic practice and theory.
findingforte.global
