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ABC Otto is a cheerful text typeface available in four considered weights. Otto has a sturdy, wide rhythm and beautifully lilting italics that will make your editor very happy. It can also cosplay as a display face, with its subtly cartoonish presence and anthropomorphic shapes. The font was developed and designed by Amsterdam-based graphic designer Sam de Groot and type-designer-meets-actor Laura Opsomer Mironov, and is a typeface for all things worth reading. 

Otto itself began its life as an irreverent remix of the 17th-century type of Miklós Kis, but over the years it gradually metamorphosized into something of its own. If you insist, it could still be seen as freewheeling fan fiction of the Baroque serif genre known as “le goût hollandois” (“the Dutch taste”), of which the Amsterdam-based Hungarian Kis was one of the leading figures. But with its much larger x-height, its round evenness rather than Kis’s stern jaggedness, and its occasionally top-heavy proportions, Otto is a proudly ahistorical design.

Available in only four weights, Otto spans Light to Bold plus italics. While Otto’s upright styles still bear a relation to the work of Miklós Kis (even if 3 x removed), the italics are an entirely new design. The usual flowery tropes of Baroque italics are abandoned in favor of a bubbly simplicity. Even though the italics have a dynamic rhythm with a strongly varying slope, their vibe is open-faced and understated, bashful and coy.