Bona Nova

Try Bona Nova

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Bona Nova Regular Italic
• Bold 700Bona Nova Bold

About Bona Nova

Bona Nova is a serif typeface that brings Bona, a 1971 design by Andrzej Heidrich, into digital form. According to the official notes, Heidrich is also known for designing Polish banknotes, and the original Bona was a cursive face; the upright Regular and the Bold were added during the revival, together with the original author, so that the family forms a set of three. The specimen shows a light text face with small, sharp serifs, old-style numerals that rise and fall like lowercase letters, and a capital R and Q with long calligraphic tails. The family holds 2,220 glyphs, and the revival added small capitals, alternate characters and OpenType features. Character sets reach beyond Latin to Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and Vietnamese. Mateusz Machalski is named as designer in the font files and Capitalics as the manufacturer.

Where Bona Nova works

Book and long-form text

The light colour, modest serifs and old-style numerals sit quietly in paragraphs, with the Italic for emphasis and titles of works.

Texts mixing several scripts

Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Hebrew character sets let one family set quotations and names across those alphabets.

Editorial headings with small caps

The small capitals added in the digitisation give bylines and running heads a second typographic level without a second family.

Polish cultural and heritage projects

The design descends from a 1971 typeface by the designer of Polish banknotes, a documented origin for exhibition and publishing work.

Display lines with a flourish

The long tail of the R and Q becomes a visible detail when a title is set large.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Romanian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian
• Vietnamese
• Russian
• Ukrainian
• Bulgarian
• Greek

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

Character sets found in the files: arabic, cyrillic, greek, hebrew, latin, latin-ext, vietnamese. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Bona Nova

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Bona Nova on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Bona Nova";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/BonaNova-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Bona Nova";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/BonaNova-Italic.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Bona Nova";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/BonaNova-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Bona Nova", serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Bona Nova with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Bona+Nova:ital,wght@0,400;0,700;1,400&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Three styles, no bold italic

The family is Regular 400, Italic 400 and Bold 700. Bold has no italic companion.

Numerals are old-style by default

The specimen shows figures of varying height with a small zero; they blend into running text more than into tables.

Static files

Bona Nova is not a variable font. Each of the styles is a separate TTF file.

FAQs

Collections with Bona Nova

• Old-style and revival serif fonts for books

  Digital revivals of Renaissance, baroque and later book types, and new designs in the old-style tradition, most with italics, for novels, essays and fine printing.

• Fonts that cover several writing systems

  Families that set Latin together with three or more other scripts in one design, for multilingual sites, apps and documents.

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All serif fonts