OBBLIGATO

About OBBLIGATO

Based on 'Mortier', originally designed in 2008 as a commission by Manuel Miranda at 2x4 for New York City Opera, "the people's opera". The type was named after the opera's then-incoming director, Gerard Mortier. The original caps-only font was inspired by the solid, heavy, straight-sided Teutonic titling fonts of the late 19th century. The font was paired by 2x4 with images by contemporary artists, including Nikki S. Lee and Ryan McGinley. The project is shown on 2x4's Behance page.

2x4 partner Susan Sellers, in a New York Magazine piece concerning the redesign: "City Opera is a bare-bones operation that produces spare versions of a luxury product. In theory, that could make it the ideal cultural entity for this lean age: What better way to forget about your troubles than to watch people sing about worse ones?" Sadly, NYCO was dissolved in 2013, and 2x4's bold identity disappeared from the city's streets.

From time-to-time over the past decade we would dust off the source files and consider the typeface as the basis for a new design. Phase 2 for the design involves work on the bold "Fortissimo" master; adding lowercase letters and revising the uppercase, while retaining the signature look of G Q R 4 $ ¢ &, and the vertically asymmetrical C E H S 3 8.

Supported Languages

Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Irish Gaelic, Italian, Kurdish, Latin, Latvian, Leonese, Lithuanian, Lower Sorbian, Luxembourgish, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Māori, Norwegian, Occitan, Polish, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian, Sami, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Upper Sorbian, Walloon, Welsh