The Nebiolo foundry, Turin (1880–1978)

In the 1930s, the designer Alessandro Butti (1893–-1959) became artistic director of the Nebiolo foundry, created in 1880, and implemented some of his creations (Cicogna, Paganini, Quirinus). Aldo Novarese soon worked alongside Butti on the development of Normandia and Augustea, then they published an all-uppercase antique, Microgramma, in 1951, which Novarese, who had become artistic director of Nebiolo in 1952, completed with a lower case, under the name Eurostile. Novarese was involved in the “Lettre Latine” movement that Vox launched around the Rencontres de Lure, the sessions of which he assiduously followed from 1953.

Aldo Novarese (1920–1995) is undoubtedly the most prolific Italian type designer of the 20th century. A very young collaborator of the Nebiolo foundry in Turin, he contributed to the creation of several typefaces under the direction of Alessandro Butti, from the end of the 1930s. At the beginninf of the 1950s, they undertake Microgramma, a caps-only antique, according to research by Novarese based on the rectangle with rounded corners, as an emblematic shape of the second half of the 20th century. Having in turn become artistic director of Nebiolo, Novarese imagined dozens of typefaces that made the foundry successful until the 1970s. He worked to complete Microgramma with a series of lowercase, which he published in 1962 under the name Eurostile. Very sensitive to the notion of “Typographie Latine” advocated by Vox, he regularly participates in the Rencontres de Lure, where he is invited to present and comment on his numerous achievements. Nebiolo deploying significant promotional material in French: press announcements, specimens and catalogs. Eurostile and Microgramma benefited from their distribution by Letraset then Microsoft, offering it in 1997 within its Office suite.

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