About Linotype Mano

Mano® is a sans serif with a handwritten character, a category to which Gerard Unger’s Flora™ also belongs. The basic letter shapes in both fonts were first drawn in felt tip; their sense of flow, however, is completely different. Mano’s letters are cast on the page in a very slanted, loose way; Flora’s letters are almost upright and drawn much more slowly and carefully. At first glance, comparing Mano to Hans Eduard Meier’s Syntax® might sound absurd. Yet like Mano, Syntax has a handwritten character and was developed from individual, handwritten letterforms. Also, both fonts use slight variations in stroke weights and their linear forms come from writing as simply and directly as possible.


Mano, Flora and Syntax: three fonts that draw directly and consistently from handwriting and which, despite their completely different concepts, still have comparable forms.

While Mano, Flora and Syntax may be rather different fonts for different applications, written with different instruments and with a different handwritten feel, all three were created in a similar way – as a very direct expression of a simple typographic idea. The focus was not on emphasizing the creator’s own handwriting, but on creating a calm typeface with optimal legibility.