Being inspired by early Czech type design, Maiola is clearly a contemporary typeface, that is mindful of its historical heritage, implementing old-style features and calligraphic reminiscence, more frankly so in the Italic. Nevertheless, through its personality, it attempts to create a welcoming tension on the page, without shouting too loudly at the reader.
It handles its expressive tendencies with care and in doing so increases its usability, with legibility being of great importance. Subtle irregularities of the letterforms enhance furthermore the dynamic spirit and liveliness of the typeface.
With the advent of Opentype, allowing for bigger character-sets and better language support, as a natural consequence, Maiola inlcudes Cyrillic and Greek. Although basically independent from each other, they are, however, designed in the same spirit as the Latin, harmonize well in multilingual text settings.
The four-weight family was published in all common font formats. The Opentype version also allows for the implemantation of typographic features such as Small Caps, lining and old-style figures, both tabular and proportional, ligatures, alternate characters, case-sensitive variants and fractions.
Maiola is currently part of the touring exhibition e-a-t, was also awarded the TDC Certificate of Excellence in Type Design in 2004, and was selected in the Creative Review design competition in 2005.