Shreya Maheshwari

Quinta is a type family inspired by a book printed in 1751 at Ex Typographia Palladis.
I wanted to design a typeface ideal for poetry, prose, essays, and arts and cultural writing, intended primarily for use in books and magazines. It should evoke a quiet & thoughtful tone, making it well suited for themes related to history, philosophy, literature, and art. Make something that can be relevant for contemporary use as well.

Why revival? Learn from the masters, why not? everyone does it. Learn from the masters, why not? Everyone does it. When someone learns to draw, they don’t start by inventing new forms from imagination. They copy the masters. They draw from life. They go straight to the source and interpret it. When I was making Quinta, I realized a revival isn’t a replica.It’s a reinterpretation, a dialogue with history. You’re adding your own voice to it. You reinterpret it. In the process, you train your eye. You begin to feel form, balance, and rhythm at a deeper level. You break down the letters to their structural core. Revival forces you to observe deeply, noticing the tiny differences in serif shape, the contrast between thick and thin, the balance in each letter, and how spacing affects rhythm across a line of text. You feel how weight moves through a stroke. It makes you ask, What were they trying to say? And more importantly, What can I say with it now? It made me understand that you are not inventing the structure of a letter from scratch. No one really does. Type isn’t born from a blank slate. Letters evolve over time. What you can do is change the flesh—the form, the additional layer of semiotic meaning—over the skeleton, the ductus.


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