Maiola in This American Life Website

Maiola, one of Veronika Burian’s earlier and multi-award winning serif designs, has been used for titles, paragraph text, and menus on the website of This American Life.

Since around 1995, This American Life has been known for its engaging depth, pith, and oddly interesting stories. More than mere journalism proper, the stories often link disparate subjects with a narrative highlighting the intensely personal amidst the American cultural and political context.

What drives longtime host and producer Ira Glass? “Our favorite sorts of stories have compelling people at the center of them, funny moments, big feelings, surprising plot twists, and interesting ideas. Like little movies for radio.” And at over four million listeners per week and numerous prestigious awards — including seven Peabodys and the first ever Pulitzer awarded to a radio show or podcast — it seems like their format is working.

Veronika created Maiola to be a contemporary typeface that is mindful of its heritage, designed to carry a human feel in text. Maiola fits This American Life’s intensely human theme by creating a welcoming tension on the digital page in oldstyle features and calligraphic reminiscences such as a humanist axis, modest contrast, and pen-formed terminals. Maiola is intended for high-quality printed text and thus handles its expressive tendencies with care to equalise the important issues of legibility and personality. Its glyphs also have purposeful and subtle irregularities to enhance its dynamic spirit.

Maiola shows that typefaces can bridge traditional storytelling and progress without losing one bit of expressiveness. Maiola covers the Latin A character set with a broad set of OpenType features, which is also included in Maiola Cyrillic, and Maiola Greek that covers polytonic Greek languages (Greek extension by Irene Vlachou).