Quarto Font

Sara Soskolne designed Quarto with Jonathan Hoefler in 2007 for Condé Nast Portfolio, with a larger retail expansion in 2014. Hendrik van den Keere’s sixteenth-century work provided historical inspiration. The contemporary family develops those ideas rather than reproducing an unchanged historical font.

Read the publisher’s family page for the source account and the edition currently offered. Keep a family name distinct from its particular release, width or optical branch.

The original inspiration supplied neither a matching italic nor a modern sequence of weights. The project therefore required new interpretations for both. Compare the balance between dense strokes and crisp serifs across weights instead of assuming the bold styles are mechanical enlargements of Regular.

Use the original publisher specimen to inspect those features. An alternative can share a broad role without having the same letter shapes, metrics or character coverage.

Try a business-magazine headline in a medium and a heavier style, keeping wording and frame dimensions fixed. Inspect the italic as a separate design choice. Use a reading-size serif companion for longer passages where the display texture needs less emphasis.

For independent comparisons, try Playfair Display and Source Serif 4. Use the same wording and approximate output size. The related style guide provides broader design context.

Use Hoefler&Co. to try the original and investigate the files, styles and terms for your intended workflow. This site does not distribute or serve Quarto font software.

The editable alternatives here have their own source profiles and included licenses. For the difference between a font file and copied characters, read Unicode text versus fonts.