Bona Nova SC
Designed By
Capitalics, Mateusz Machalski, Andrzej Heidrich
3 Styles Serif
The pleasure
of a well-set
page.
Bona Nova SC · Regular
Compare this serif family in headings and a continuous reading sample.
3 styles available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download Bona Nova SC ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
Chamber concert in the old library
A Page In Bona Nova SC
Bona Nova SC · Regular
Headings, labels and running text.
Notes From The Reading Room
The reading room opens onto a quiet courtyard. Along the shelves, small handwritten labels mark the collections. A visitor leaves a book open beside the window, keeping a place for the next reader.
A heading marks the next chapter. The margins leave room for a note while the text continues across the page.
3 Styles,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Regular400
Chamber concert in the old library
Italic400
Chamber concert in the old library
Bold700
Chamber concert in the old library
Andrzej Heidrich designed Polish banknotes, and in 1971 he drew a typeface called Bona. It was a cursive. Bona Nova is the digital form of it, made by Mateusz Machalski at Capitalics, and the project went well past copying old letters: the character set was widened, small caps and alternates were drawn, the OpenType programming added. Heidrich worked with them on 2 new versions, a Regular and a Bold, so his cursive ended up as the italic of a classic family of 3.
This page is the SC cut, the one set up around small capitals, which Google added in 2024.
The italic
Look at it first. It is the old Bona, a true cursive with joined, sloping strokes, and it sets close to 13% narrower than the roman, so a phrase in italic sits tighter than you expect next to the spaced caps. We like that contrast on a wine label or the title page of a slim book of poems; for a long passage it would tire the eye.
The character set goes well beyond Western Latin, into Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Vietnamese, 1,384 characters in each file. Old style and lining figures, fractions, contextual alternates, discretionary ligatures and 4 stylistic sets are built in, so there is room to play.
Characters & Figures
1,384 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 400 recorded characters.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
Bona Nova SC
3 TTF styles with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 567 KB ↓- Version
- 4.001
- License
- SIL Open Font License 1.1
Install On Your Computer
Extract the ZIP first. On Windows, select the font files and choose Install from the context menu. On macOS, open the files in Font Book and choose Install.
Use On A Website
Keep the font files and the included stylesheet together. Update the stylesheet path to match your project.
<link rel="stylesheet"
href="/fonts/bona-nova-sc-2/bona-nova-sc-2.css">
body {
font-family: 'Bona Nova SC', sans-serif;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
The family provides the heading; Inter carries the supporting text.
Bona Nova SC Heading · Inter Body
Notes From The Reading Room
The reading room opens onto a quiet courtyard. Along the shelves, small handwritten labels mark the collections. A visitor leaves a book open beside the window, keeping a place for the next reader.