ITDC 2003 Winners

Pirouette is based on a logotype that Japanese designer Ryuichi Tateno created for a packaging design project in 1999 - a shampoo container, at that! Already Tateno’s original design experimented with overlapping swash italic letterforms. These experiments grew outside out their initial packaging project, taking on a life of their own.
The Pirouette type family contains six different elements. Pirouette Text is a beautiful, finely drawn Italic hand, which can set long passages of text. Pirouette Regular is more formal, with elaborate Swash capitals. The Pirouette Regular font can also set whole lengths of text on its own, and its letters may be freely interchanged with those from Pirouette Text. The letters contained in Pirouette Alternate, Pirouette Separate 1, and Pirouette Separate 2 do not constitute complete character sets. These additional decorative letters may be further interchanged with those in Pirouette Text and Pirouette Regular to create splendidly ornate text. Border letterforms in these artful text creations may be further augmented by the last member of the Pirouette family, Pirouette Ornaments. .
The Pirouette type family, which represents Tanteno’s first commercial font design, is greatly influenced by the calligraphic and typographic work of the master German designer, Prof. Hermann Zapf, especially his recent Zapfino collection.